... so when it was more or less discovered that the boy was somehow killed, and then his bloody body briefly shown, and then cut to shocked reactions of parents and then news about the Ukrainian conflicts shown...
Was it somehow meant to be implied that the boy was murdered as a result of the recent Russia and Ukraine conflict, but who really killed him and why?
Even though, it could well have been a suicide for instance, maybe he let himself get him by a train, and the Russian Ukraine conflict was just like a Michael Haneke-esque cinematic touch, but it could be implied that he took his own life due to a lack of love?
shareHaving watched the movie recently, it was not clear to me that the boy was dead. When shown the dead body, the mother starts crying but she says that's not her son's corpse... he supposedly had a mark in his chest that the body did not have. Although... how much can we truly believe her? She wasn't such a very good mother after all
Anyway, the child's death (or not) has nothing to do with the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
I think at that time she was merely in DENIAL and just didn't WANT to mentally and theoretically accept the fact that it WAS her son that was dead and she was obviously grief stricken and in great shock.
shareTo me, after some reflection it was clear that the dead boy in the morgue was theirs. When the parents saw the body they had an immediate shock that it was their boy. Then the mother went into denial, she got upset that the father wasn't denying it. Finally we see the mother walking out in despair and the father crying sitting by the wall. It was their child 100%, otherwise they wouldn't have this reaction.
sharePer the plot on wiki, the body that was found was NOT the son. The story doesn’t ever explain what happened.
shareNo, it had nothing to do with the Russian - Ukrainian conflict. The movie wanted to show the atmosphere the Russian people had that time by watching TV news. It was sad because Russians and Ukrainians were very close in the USSR and they considered each other brothers.
shareYou know, the symbolism Zvyagintsev is using in his movies is really very primitive and aggressively straightforward. It's not always obvious for the foreigners and the festival crowd (hypnotized by all that Russian exotics, weird stuff and non-existent 'spirituality'), but it's true. Why on Earth all this shallowness is considered by many to be great - is beyond me. Probably, the reason is that people suspect his movies to be deep and it's just them, the viewers who lack some understanding.
Not true!
As to your question:
The boy is, first of all, a child, the Future. His name is Alyosha Sleptsov. Alyosha (or Alexey) is a name that is connected in Russian popular culture with simplicity, gullibility, holiness and all the unimaginable hardships resulting from the above. Alexey the God's man is an extremely popular saint and partly because of that Dostoyevsky used that name for one of his most famous protagonists. Summing it up - Alyosha is always someone who suffers immensely but is also a saint.
Now Sleptsov means 'the son of the blind'. This is understandable - his parents are unable to monitor their own behaviour, foresee the results. In a broader sense - they are not just Alyosha's parents but also modern Russians not understanding how to behave properly and thus engaging in an escalating conflict with Ukrainians, harming their own future.
So yes, you could very well see the disappearance of the boy and his uncertain fate at the end as a result of political conflicts and as a symbol of the vagueness of Russian political and social perspectives.
And that is Zvyagintsev for you. Nothing deep about his movies at all. And to think some people compare him to the genius of Tarkovsky. What a joke.
I was also really disappointed with the movie, nothing ever happens, just contemplating a modern broken couple for an hour and a half.
Absolutely empty, and the character of the mother is so horrible that it's hard to watch.
Was the body really him? I mean forensics would have let them know right away, if the body was meant to be him, I thought we would see some acknowledgement of that.
shareNo I thought it wasn't their child as the father also says it's not him.
shareI watched this yesterday and I thought so too, but reading the above I'm having second thoughts. I just watched the morgue scene again and it does look like conscious denial by the mom, and the dad goes along with it to appease her. She gets angry at him for not confirming that the corpse is not their son.
Instead of being relieved their son is not dead and might be alive, they are broken down in grief. When she walks out of the room, he falls to the floor in tears.
I don't think the Ukraine conflict was relevant, just a backdrop.