Maryana Spivak makes a hostile marriage convincing without asking us to excuse the cruelty. We rate the unsentimental force of her work in Loveless, though its near-total lack of tenderness limits what she can show.
Fi1m perspective
In Loveless (2017), Maryana Spivak’s Zhenya argues as though she has heard the reply before her husband opens his mouth. Aleksey Rozin’s Boris gives back the same exhausted hostility, and together they make a convincing marriage out of people who cannot stop quarrelling. Neither expects to persuade the other. Spivak lets us recognise that behaviour without asking us to forgive it. It is a forceful, unsentimental performance, and the main reason we would seek out more of her work.
The screenplay by Andrey Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin lets the couple’s loathing spread to their child, with no reassurance that being parents will make them kinder. We were deeply upset by the way Spivak and Rozin make that neglect feel like an extension of an ordinary argument. Spivak has described Zhenya as a woman who wants love and a fresh start. That helps explain why the performance remains recognisable even when her behaviour is hard to bear. Understanding what she wants does not make watching her any more comfortable.
Early television and supporting film parts preceded the breakthrough lead in Loveless. Her subsequent work includes Irina in the post-apocalyptic television series To the Lake (2019) and Yuliya in Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020). A supporting appearance as Alexa, the Russian stage manager in Danny Boyle’s Yesterday (2019), takes her into a different setting. These are useful reminders that she has worked beyond domestic drama. Her international reputation nevertheless rests heavily on Zhenya, and that is the performance on which our judgement chiefly depends.
Spivak is frequently cast as an unsympathetic mother or a woman in a strained relationship. The risk is that such parts keep asking for the same hostility, however well she supplies it. Even Loveless narrows what she and Rozin can show us through its near-total lack of tenderness. We would like to see what she does with a script that gives tenderness equal attention. See Loveless for her work with Rozin, but choose an evening when you can bear their company.
Biography
Maryana Spivak is a Russian actress. She was born in Moscow in 1985 and is the granddaughter of actress Zhanna Prokhorenko. She trained at the Moscow Art Theatre School and has worked in film, television and voice-over dubbing since the early 1990s.
Spivak is known for her role as Zhenya in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (2017). She has also appeared in Yesterday (2019) as Alexa, Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest (2020) as Yuliya, and the series To the Lake (2019) as Irina. For Loveless, she received a nomination for Best Actress from the Russian Guild of Film Critics.
