Ruined intimacy and intimate ruins in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (2017)

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by a period of cultural disorientation, and ensuing the rise of unfettered capitalism, offers scholars a conceptual magnifying glass with which to understand radical social change. Contemporary Russian popular culture, emerging in this unique social context, becomes a privileged venue to scrutinize the nature and implications of radical change. This article explores the transformations of intimacy through the lens of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest feature film Loveless (2017). This film captures a profound disruption of intimacy in compliance with market principles, technology and social media. Zvyagintsev juxtaposes instances of ruined intimacy with spaces of intimate physical ruins. The article suggests that the cinematic visual meditation on ruins and ruination implicates a more expansive meditation on the transient and permanent aspects of our lives, the intersection between nature and culture, as well as the play between presence and absence. By drawing on Aronson’s (2015) cross-cultural work on emotional frameworks, this article argues that Loveless (2017) shows how Aronson’s regime of (rational) choice colonizes the regime of (passionate) faith, with deleterious consequences.