May 2017: Andrei Zvyagintsev's new film Loveless wins the Cannes Jury Prize Award. Image: Wild Bunch. When a top-down political system adopts fake news and general disinformation as policy, sincere sentiment can be automatically politicised — simply because it has a way of cutting through the bullshit. The same goes for humour, especially the really good and really pointed kind of humor.
This politicisation isn’t just performed by the state itself. It’s performed by everyone who gets a speaking part in public discourse. The films of Andrei Zvyagintsev are a good example of that, particularly the way in which they’re discussed within his native Russia.
We’re already used to self-proclaimed Russian patriots, be they officials, random internet trolls, or people genuinely insecure about Russia’s image and role in the world, accusing Zvyagintsev of deliberately making bleak films about Russia for the sake of “impressing russophobic western film festival judges” or whatever. Their arguments are old and stale, but, in a country that loves a good moral panic around a film or a work of art, they are also expedient.
