Queering the Mainstream: Anna Melikian’s About Love (2015)

Abstract

ABSTRACT About Love (2015), Anna Melikian’s fourth film, is her first attempt at mainstream cinema. Mimicking the form of an almanac film, it comprises five apparently discrete but intimately interconnected short films, or novellas, all set in Moscow. Their most obvious link is the film’s central thread: a lecture about love at the Strelka Institute, attended by the protagonists of some of the novellas and delivered by one of them: an expert on the topic, played by Renata Litvinova. None of the novellas directly addresses non-heteronormative sexualities, through focussing on same-sex relationships. However, the centrality of Litvinova – arguably Russian cinema’s most prominent queer icon – introduces an unignorable note of the queer. On closer viewing, moreover, it becomes clear both that the film does depict queer identities, subjectivities and relationships and that it is queer in other ways. Drawing on various queer and feminist theoretical approaches, this article therefore argues that About Love depicts post-2013 Moscow as a place that can accommodate and celebrate queerness, demonstrating that Melikian’s representation of love challenges the ostensible narrative assumptions of heterosexual normativity and offers, as a queer counterpoint to the mainstream, a range of compelling non-normative representations of love and the self.