Word: katerina
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...story is unremarkable, much the way the story of Breathless is unremarkable. The film chronicles the lives of three country girls, Antonina, Liudmilla and Katerina--all of whom are living in Moscow. Russia's version of Las Vegas, or maybe Marin County, a center of power where anything can happen. Not surprisingly, these honest but low-rent outsiders have dreams of playing this crapshoot for keeps--they want to marry and be able to live the Big Life for good. Antonina is shy and not terribly ambitious. A country house, a car, a nice hubby and fresh vegetables...
They're there, too, because Menshov is interested in Katerina. Their flatness leaves him room to explore her complicated character, and that's what the film is really about. It's rare to see anyone in a film, especially a woman, explored with the devotion-Menshov gives to Katerina. At the film's opening it is 1958, and we watch as the three girls bubble through Moscow, looking for love. On the second half of the film though, it is 20 years later and the movie focuses entirely on Katerina. Burned by her earlier affairs, abandoned with a child...
THIS IS A very long movie, and it has that odd, wistful note of so many foreign films. As Katerina's flashes of girlishness become more precious, more subdued, and more rare, one slowly feels the complexity of maturity with all it's dreadful compromises. It is not until the last fortyfive minutes or so that Menshov even bothers to give you a hint that such naivete might be fulfilled. It will come, of course, embodied in a lover who can be one with all the personas Katerina has created--a knowing idealist, a lover and an admirer...
Because here, an awful lot of care has been taken. All the time Menshov has spent trying to show, not simplify Katerina, makes it possible to show, not simplify her romance. And why? Because their affair is so clarly not Hollywood, and yet it's as close as you're ever likely to come. He refuses to make it easy and slick and dumb. It's a love affair against all odds, and though it will certainly lose in the end, it is as good as things can get without being celluloid...
This quick shift in time and perspective effectively symbolizes the stealthy passing of the years: one day you look up and find your child almost grown, your career at its peak and a strange emptiness in your heart. In Katerina's case, the void is filled when she meets Gosha (Alexei Batalov), a magical figure on the order of the Alan Bates character in An Unmarried Woman. The difference is that he has none of the latter's squishy glamour. Gosha is a workingman, an upholder of traditional male values, however humorously he states them...