Word: menshov
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...beefy hockey player, and he, naturally turns into a ne'er-do-well, leaving her on the skids, trying to snag a better catch. She turns into another pant-suited, overly made-up loser with a hopeless streak of fantasy. You can see what you like in this. Maybe Menshov really is saying that if you gamble with killer mammon you'll end up paying the price. Maybe he really is a Communist Bob Barker. Not that you can't see plenty of her type in Milwaukee, though. It seems more likely that these characters are simply options, points...
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...
...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 of her work. And, impossibly, he does come. His name...
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 care Menshov takes with Katerina is a step most directors will not try. Moscow could never end anywhere after an hour and a half and still be satisfying and relatively memorable. But there is a remarkable ambition here, one that, granted, strays on occasion a bit too far in certain directions, and one which is technically not always up to the state of the art, (the shooting technique is rather workmanlike, and sometimes the directorial flourishes are, well, hackneyed), but this, after all, is not the point. and it's not much of a problem. Menshov is concerned with...