This Oscar winning Russian film from 1979 begins the action in 1958, when we get to know three young women, who have come from the provinces to study in Moscow and are now living in a student's residence. While they are studying, they work in blue collar, factory jobs, but dream of escaping that life by marrying some powerful men. When a professor asks them to take care of his nice apartment while he's traveling, they see this as a perfect opportunity to impersonate women of higher status than they are and woo some eligible man into the apartment. One of the girls woos a famous athlete, another named Katya (who eventually becomes the center of the movie and is played by the beautiful Vera Alentova) gets involved with a cameraman in the then new medium of television. Eventually, Katya gets pregnant from the encounter with him, and when he realizes that she is a factory girl instead of a professor's daughter, decides to have nothing to do with her (he is in part afraid of the rejection of his snobbish mother, and the subtext of this, of course, is that the Soviet Union was far from a classless society). She thinks about aborting her baby, but eventually gives birth to a daughter and decides to raise her alone.
The movie then cuts to twenty years later. While her friends have married but remain trapped in a drab, working class life, Katya has remained single but has prospered professionally. She is now a director in a factory (a prestigious job in Soviet times) and lives in a nice apartment with her daughter, who is now a young woman. Despite her professional success, Katya is still looking for love, though she usually ends up in doomed affairs (for instance, when she gets involved with a married man). Eventually, she finds a promising prospect with Gosha, a masculine blue collar worker she finds on the train. But just when the relationship starts to develop, the long forgotten cameraman reappears in her life.
One of the interesting things of this movie is to get a glimpse of Soviet life at the late Brezhnev era, a time of relative prosperity Sometimes the director goes for the easy reaction of the public, and modern audiences might not always approve of some of the cultural mores. But this is an interesting and entertaining film if somewhat overlong (two hours and a half).
The movie then cuts to twenty years later. While her friends have married but remain trapped in a drab, working class life, Katya has remained single but has prospered professionally. She is now a director in a factory (a prestigious job in Soviet times) and lives in a nice apartment with her daughter, who is now a young woman. Despite her professional success, Katya is still looking for love, though she usually ends up in doomed affairs (for instance, when she gets involved with a married man). Eventually, she finds a promising prospect with Gosha, a masculine blue collar worker she finds on the train. But just when the relationship starts to develop, the long forgotten cameraman reappears in her life.
One of the interesting things of this movie is to get a glimpse of Soviet life at the late Brezhnev era, a time of relative prosperity Sometimes the director goes for the easy reaction of the public, and modern audiences might not always approve of some of the cultural mores. But this is an interesting and entertaining film if somewhat overlong (two hours and a half).