"Petty Love" is an excellent psychological thriller in which the tension escalates with every frame. This film is a laureate of the Cannes Film Festival.
To watch the film, you need courage, and to interpret it, you must be ready to acknowledge unpleasant truths and seek their causes.
The film tells the story of a modern family in which a couple, Zhenya and Boris, are planning to divorce but cannot agree on who will take custody of their son, Alyosha. In a series of conflicts and endless mutual accusations, they openly neglect him, and 12-year-old Alyosha feels utterly unwanted by both parents. After overhearing another argument at night, where they discuss sending their son to an orphanage for their own "happy life," Alyosha disappears the next day and never returns home.
Even then, his parents are too preoccupied to properly search for him, though they eventually begin looking. In total, Alyosha remains missing for two years, and by the end of the film, his fate remains unresolved. His parents go their separate ways into new relationships, but they bring the same emotional baggage into these new families. They haven’t changed at all.
The film also highlights the broader implications of family dysfunction, showing how such issues originate and ripple outward, affecting the wider world. The imagery of abandoned buildings, cold, and political events forces the viewer to reflect on how seemingly small events can escalate and what consequences they may unleash.
The film clearly illustrates the narcissistic trauma that inflicts a wound on Alyosha’s sense of self. In such cases, self-rejection often follows. Here, we see the trauma of a rejected child. The parents lack empathy entirely. What a way to communicate?! They have erased their child from their reality.
The absence of empathy, understanding, and acceptance of others are all narcissistic traits vividly demonstrated by the film’s protagonists. Their infantilism—acting like children rather than adults—reveals that they never experienced warm, close relationships themselves. They lacked proper parental role models in their own childhoods and replicate the same dysfunctional patterns in their new families. These are adults who don’t know what it means to be loved. By the end of the film, it’s clear they haven’t changed internally; they continue in the same destructive cycle, repeating the same family script.
In conclusion, it’s crucial to accept our own feelings and emotions without harming others. This is a case where self-awareness and acceptance are vital. If we learn to recognize and view events differently, the harmful repetitions in our lives will diminish.”
