For nearly two years, July Rain was, without exaggeration, the only film I could focus on watching. When one devotes oneself to a movie this way, purposefully or not, one might start seeing the entire world in it. Certainly, I convinced myself that the film explains the conditions that create a society that wakes up one day to find with dumb, bleary-eyed surprise that a war has begun in its name. 

A few years ago, before the war, I went on a walk in Moscow. It was June and it was raining. I was visiting from New York, after an absence of a year and a half. I was walking down Myasnitskaya Street, from the large bookstore where I had not found what I was looking for, to nowhere in particular. I just remember passing the Lubyanka Building, and thinking about it as a vault of cruelty and suffering and how much space it takes up in the city. For a while, I thought of it as the walk through my hometown that I didn’t know would be my last. I was certain that it was, perhaps forever. But not even three years later, I found myself walking these streets again. 

The Moscow of July Rain is one that is always in flux: scaffolding, renovations, building sites, barren patches that by all indications will not be such for that much longer. This was not unlike the Moscow of my adolescence: always some road being built, expanded; factories became nightclubs or exhibition centers, old movie theaters would routinely resurrect, new museums sprang up like mushrooms. Construction always, everywhere, a project never to be completed. Now, all of it—this forward movement—is gone. New things appear overnight, on the sly. Moscow seems to be finished. 

In retrospect, it was always heading that way. 

***

It is July in the mid-sixties, and in Moscow it is raining during Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev’s Thaw. A rain enveloping the whole city after a series of hot summer days. It pours over each district, each neighborhood, each street: over Sokolniki, over the Enthusiasts’ Highway, over Gorkiy Street. It pounds the huge building of the hotel Rossiya in Zarayd’ye, streams down the cupolas of St. Basil’s Cathedral, and descends upon the cobbled plaza where the guards are doing their ritual change, as they always do, no matter the weather. The crowds too move along the streets like water, overflowing, spilling into and out of this broad-roaded city’s underpasses. At first, they don’t notice; then they scatter, like droplets, to hide from the rain. They see only directly in front of themselves and don’t know–aren’t considering—that it is raining everywhere, that the plight of being rained on isn’t theirs alone but that of people all over the city, out to Novgorod, Vladimir, the entire Golden Ring. 

The camera pans along Petrovka, one of Moscow’s most trodden streets. As the rain begins, it glides over the cobbled passage of Neglinnaya, past the central department store known as TSUM, over the bit of pavement just one crossing east from the Bolshoi, moving quickly along a path that any Muscovite committed to muscle memory, as if it is searching for someone. Images and sounds from elsewhere stud the montage: the renaissance painter’s Andrea Montagna’s Holy Family, Leonardo’s Madonna Litta which hangs at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, set to the overture from Bizet’s Carmen, then a tango, then a foxtrot, then the famous Soviet sportscaster Ozyorov is commentating a Portugal-Brazil game: “Eusébio’s kick reaches its go-o-oal;” the writer Kornei Chukovsky reads Zaichiki v Tramvaichike, his children’s story about rabbits on a tram; in a studied tone a woman’s voice, perhaps that of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, says: “I’m learning too now.” Somewhere near Lubyanka, or maybe it is the entry from Tverskaya Street onto Kuznetskiy Most, the camera catches a young woman’s glance from beneath the assertive flick of her eyeliner, and for the rest of its duration the 1966 film July Rain, directed by Marlen Khutsiev, will not let her out of its sight. 

This young woman, who we’ll get to know as Lena, shelters under the awning of a store, large ads for Vostok-brand watches in the background. “Goddammit, how inconvenient,” she says out loud, to nobody in particular, her arms crossed, eyes rolling skywards. “Yes. We’re cut off from the rest of the world,” says a blond young man, his handsome face furrowed. She decides to make a run for it; before she rushes off, this stranger stops her and insists she take his jacket; it’s waterproof, or is supposed to be, he tells her. “How will I give it back to you?” Lena asks him. It shouldn’t be difficult, he tells her. “You know what? Take my number, B5-14-90! There’s always someone home!” Her words fly his way as she flits off in the opposite direction, his jacket over her head, only a cheerful спасибо trailing after her. The stranger won’t appear on screen again. We only learn his name to be Zhenya and hear his voice in a series of phone calls with Lena, a means to no end other than disembodied heart-to-heart conversations. We learn little about either character, but everything about the world they hoped to inhabit—a sincere and honest one, in line with their ideals. He never gets his jacket back.  

These phone calls are like hinges in a construction of vignettes depicting urban dailiness in the Soviet midcentury. Khutsiev paints a portrait of the intelligentsia at the end of a short-lived era of seeming liberalization, introducing the viewer to a group of variously striped members of the intellectual class—Lena at its center—as they drift through their lives. But as the director’s gaze lingers on them, an uneasy sense of the tides changing emerges from beneath their quip-filled conversations, revealing the film’s loose plot to be a story of disillusionment.

 It is not entirely clear where the film plays on the political timeline — whether Khrushchev has been replaced by Brezhnev yet, or if Joseph Brodsky is already serving his sentence in an Arkhangelsk labor camp. The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, an event that would have rippled through this milieu, it seems, is yet to happen; they certainly don’t know that in just a matter of a few years, the Soviet Union would invade Czechoslovakia, a fracture that would prove to have been the beginning of its end. We watch these characters at the edges of their youths pacing back and forth over their ideals, deciding which to keep and which to abandon, suspended in the corridor between a bright communist future and the compromised reality of this historical project. We see them notice the scuffs and indents on the objects of their idealism. Endings, romantic and otherwise, sit like words at the tips of their tongues; most are swallowed, only Lena lets hers roll, but it is too late: the thaw is over, and stagnation will soon start to settle on this thickening film of ice. 

***

But before Zhenya calls, the viewer will get to know Lena as a twenty-seven-year-old engineer at a printing house specializing in reproductions of classical art, considering marriage or graduate school, or both, in a manner too languid for her mother’s taste. We meet Lena’s boyfriend, Volodya: thirty years old, handsome, at the foot of a promising scientific career—a geologist, we surmise, his research dealing with an apparent shortage of freshwater. As one scene cuts to the next, we see the couple fooling about, working on his paper, exchanging private jokes composed from untraceable references, buttoning up their shirts. But no matter when you are watching it, the film does not want to make itself understood. It portrays reality this way: as taking the shape of that which is not shown or uttered—innuendo, omission, reserve, implication. 

Lena has built a world of her own within the confines of the living rooms and kitchens and cafés to which she has access, through the company that she keeps. It’s a world that exists entirely to be interpreted, serving most often as fodder for those very inside jokes whipped up on the spot—a skill mastered by the Soviet Intelligent. Anything can be made into a source of entertainment, which we see as we observe Lena flitting through an apartment filled with the members of her milieu: academics at various stages of their careers, miscellaneous intellectuals and those approximating them. Their lives are marked by a cheerful, aspirational cosmopolitanism, barely sustained by their meager earnings: the intelligentsia of the 60’s—the shestidesyatniki, children of Khruschev’s Secret Speech—what was the Silent Generation elsewhere.

Lena, with a drink in her hand, good-natured mischief in her eyes, her modish bob slightly tousled, twirls through the crowd. Some are dancing American fad-dances, others are reading a newspaper from Poland: news from the West. A spectacled woman sits knitting, while Lena is introduced to a nerdy-looking man in a white sweater, Vladik. He immediately spews factoids at her and subjects her to a personality test from a magazine. Leaning against one of the walls of the bustling apartment, Volodya talks to a friendly-faced man of middle age—we will get to know him as Alik, a guitar-playing attorney and a veteran of WWII. The party carries itself from one tangent to another, the hostess raises a toast to Volodya’s recent success, in response to which he feigns cluelessness about what she means, evading elaboration under the pretense of modesty. Someone brings up a friend who has sold his car as an experiment in absolving himself from his habits, the polite man with whom Lena had been dancing nods in approval and says that he hasn’t bought a car so as to not become “a slave” to it; Volodya jokes that he has no plans of buying a car because trams are his passion. There are rumblings that a guitar is needed for Alik to sing, and Lena takes it upon herself to procure one—she returns from making the rounds among neighboring apartments, going downstairs to be sent upstairs, holding her trophy above her head before triumphantly handing it to Alik, recounting the fib she told about needing to impress a young man. Momentarily the life of the party, this is when Vladik approaches her to rattle off the results of the personality test, pointing his finger at her as he reads them out: “You’re closed-off and reserved, and inscrutable, you appear confident to others but that is a distorted reflection of your soul.” With a theatrical shrug, Lena tells him that this is all absolutely correct. 

Meanwhile, the party regroups around Alik, who sits on the daybed and starts playing songs characteristic of the Soviet bard: ironic ditties—upbeat, brisk strumming, and half-spoken, half-sung lyrics about observations made on the street. As Alik sings, Lena and Volodya whisper between themselves—she asks him who the glum man smoking in the corner is, he tells her that he is the owner of the apartment, the husband of the cheerful lady puttering about. They exchange more amused quips about the scene, and Lena suddenly asks Volodya if he wants  to go away with her. 

“Let’s stay for a bit longer,” he misunderstands, and she tells him that no, she meant that they should go away somewhere on vacation, just the two of them, away from the endless chatter of this crowd. Before he can answer, they are both distracted by the ensuing conversation;  someone had asked Alik if the songs he was singing were his own, and Alik tells them that no, they are by his friend, an artist named Brusnikin, that during the day he paints pictures in “the style of the academy,” of harvesters out on the fields and other socialist-realist subject matter, and at night he writes these songs. “Hobbies,” Vladik is quick to retort: “There’s a global hobby craze.” He starts telling everyone about his physicist friend, an avid snorkler and philatelist, but Lena interrupts him: “Vladik, find me a hobby!” He tells her, in the same know-it-all tone, that if he were in her position, he’d be a collector of friends. “Wonderful, I’m recruiting you into my collection—you’re a curious fellow!” Everyone laughs, but the mood in the room is shifting: Alik has launched into something easily identifiable as a wartime song as soon as he starts strumming its marchlike rhythm. “Life hasn’t settled its score with death yet,” he sings. The glum man in the corner, the owner of the apartment, raises his eyes for the first time.

***

We see Lena at home, as she wakes up in the one-and-a-half rooms, as Joseph Brodsky might have called this dwelling, which she shares with her parents in a communal apartment. We see her waking up, rising from her narrow, twin-bed mattress; we see her in the apartment hallway, ripping the receiver of the wall-mounted rotary phone out of her neighbor’s teenage son’s hands as he asks the caller if it’s a blonde or a brunette they are looking to speak with; we see her having a rushed breakfast with her mother, who repeats Lena’s amorphous responses to questions such as “what are your plans tonight?” (“nothing in particular”) and “should we go to see the Belov’s tomorrow? (“maybe some other night”). Lena’s evasions are deliberate. The lighthearted tone in which she delivers them betrays that she knows that she is being indirect and wants her interlocutor to know it: honest negation without the pain of a “no.” A door kept slightly ajar. There is a theatricality to it—the performance of someone aware of their delusions, maintaining loyalty to them. 

While dusting a large shelving unit, made out of lacquered plywood, Lena and her mother talk. They talk about Lena’s father; the conversation does not reveal much other than the fact that he had volunteered to go on a work trip—a komandirovka, we surmise, not of the hotel-and-a-rental-car sort, but something physically taxing, not ideal for someone of poor health. The trip would last until winter. “Why is this an obligation for some people, and not for others?” asks Lena, referring to the colleague instead of whom, against everyone’s best judgment, her father had gone on this trip. The implication: Lena’s father is an honest, hard-working man who views his actions as a matter of honor. 

Her mother changes the subject: will Lena be going on vacation in September? Does that depend on him? The line of questioning heads towards whether or not marriage was in Lena and Volodya’s plans. Something needs to be decided. “So consider me married,” Lena says distractedly, picking at her nails with scissors. Her mother tells her that she can’t accept that. “Then consider me something else. Consider me engaged, that he is my fiancé, that we’re waiting until we get an apartment,” says Lena. She once again finds a distraction, climbing on the table to rip off the wallpaper that had grown slack and baggy on the walls. Her mother is not pleased with her impulsiveness, steps into the foreground, pulls out a cigarette and matches from her apron. The scene grows theatrical. Lena sits in the background, one leg bent at the knee, the other hanging off the table. “Mother, let’s just agree: I am getting married.” She is getting married and everyone is happy. No more questions.” Her mother asks what will happen after, the lie will fester for too long. “Mom, let’s agree that everyone decides how to live their own life.” Cut to the next scene, we see Lena dressed to go out. 

She, of course, is meeting up with Volodya and his friends, who, we infer, from the lively gossip being exchanged, are also his colleagues. The subject of their patter is that the paper that he had been writing with Lyova, whom we meet in this scene—a tall man of soft outlines, ahead of thick gray hair, equally thick glasses, and a demeanor of friendly solemnity. The paper had made its way to the desk of Shapovalov, a senior academic in their department. We are made to understand that, within the world they inhabit, this is political, will have lasting impacts on their career, that likely, this paper that everyone is talking about, will only be printed in a journal if it’s author is stated to be Shapovalov, whose interests, it is said, nobody knows—“they keep changing,” laughs one of them. 

At the café, Lyalya, the woman who had been most vocal in the conversation about the Shapovalov affair, sits next to Lena and tells her with a smirk that she is impressed with how calmly Volodya is taking all of this; “It’s like he knows something but isn’t saying it.” She lights her cigarette with a match. Did Lena think that they’re having a fling, Lyalya and Volodya? No? Well, thank God, she says, nowadays jealousy in women is as tacky as “bragging about one’s princely lineage in our time.” Lyalya carries on, decrying the mores of the institute, filled with daring young men, who “tip-toe around, afraid of bruising their knees.”

Lena’s eyes wander around the table until they meet Lyova’s. “They’re making a whole lot of noise,” he says quietly, with a smile. She nods and asks him if it is true that this might all cause him trouble. “Of course,” he tells her, his voice undulating with measured jocularity, “but these days it’s a bit awkward to not be in some sort of trouble—if there isn’t any, some invent it.” But seriously, Lena asks him, what will happen? “Nobody has died from such things yet,” he shrugs. “Truth will prevail in the end, of course, but sometimes this only happens in the fourth act of the play.” 

Meanwhile, Volodya continues to dodge engaging in the conversation about the paper’s authorship. To the question of his stance on the conundrum, he responds: “My stance is that I am hungry.” His interlocutor laughs, telling Volodya that he’s being serious. “I’m serious too,” says Volodya. “We’ll stand defending the barricades until the very end. Another member of their party, a balding man, finally puts down his paper and, with a dismayed shake of the head, tells them: “you people are children.” The war is not to be named, but also not to be made light of. 

A few rungs of conversation later, Lena leans to Volodya: “Let’s leave,” she says quietly. A wonderful idea, he tells her, and suggests that she leaves first and then he. The next scene sees the whole group from the café at the apartment Volodya is house-sitting, while its owner is teaching ballet in Afghanistan, as he tells Lyalya. Lena walks by, fixing everyone coffee, her body tense with irritation. Alik has now joined the group, speaking loudly, for the entire party to hear, telling them that he had long noticed that every person is made from a specific material. There’s regular clay, and there’s that of the fire-resistant sort, he muses; there’s reinforced concrete—a very common material—and sometimes one comes across porcelain, he says as someone hands him a guitar. There are people with shingled roofs, and there are prefab structures. There’s Lyova, he says; his roof is thatched with straw. Lyayla asks what she is made from, and is told that she consists of top-of-the-line synthetic fibers. “And then there’s our friend Volodya,” Alik continues, “he is made from the most modern materials: antimagnetic, frost- and waterproof, corrosion-resistant. He can be launched into space and won’t burn in the atmosphere’s denser layers. That is why I’m not worried about him.” 

Alik launches into song—a steady ballad urging his tovarisch to keep calm, reminding him that there is still plenty of life to be lived, composed by the artist who plays Alik himself, Yuriy Vizbor. There are still other wars to come for them to die in, he sings. In the next shot, Lyalya is shown to be on the phone, the quick, upbeat rhythms of her speech replaced with tired concern. “Is Mishka still not asleep?” she asks her mother. We infer that this is her son she is speaking of, that the father is not in the picture. She will be home soon, she says with a sigh. The party is over.  

Lena’s father never comes back from his work trip—he has died. She reveals this on the phone to Zhenya, who calls without any intention of picking up his jacket. She ends the call and steps into the room where we last saw her cleaning with her mother. Her mother’s eyes gleam with tears, the camera pans out, and we see that the room is filled with people. Volodya stands in the corner, quiet and stiff in a black suit. Men in military uniform, middle-aged women with cigarettes protruding from their fleshy fists. There is a lot of whispering, things half-said, half-answered. A man comes in and silently embraces Lena’s mother as she weeps. Lena’s cousin, stout and matronly, especially so next to the up-and-down figure of our heroine, sits her down and begins questioning her about Volodya. Does he like fishing? Drinking? Is he a penny-pincher? Is he a womanizer? Are they married? No, Lena answers each of the questions. 

***

Zhenya keeps calling. During one phone call, Lena recounts the circumstances of her father’s untimely death—he hadn’t been feeling well, things aligned so that his colleagues pulled out of this trip, and he insisted on going. Another time, she reasons to Zhenya that she is a closed-off and reserved person, quoting the personality test, that when she is asked how she is doing, she only ever says “I’m well, thank you.” Yet another time, she says that she hasn’t been keeping a diary, but if she had been, she would have written in it that her day had passed without any happenings of note. She asks him if he likes his job, tells him that she, too, likes hers. Does he have parents? By this she means to ask if they survive the war and its aftermaths. If only there weren’t ever war again, she muses, isn’t that right? Has he also read about the small planet that is heading towards their own? Apparently, it is no longer projected to collide with Earth, it has changed its mind, so everyone can rest easy. This is annoying, and that is abhorrent behavior; her father, she counters—he never complained and never expressed feelings of envy; he believed that envy is the most degrading of feelings and believed—hoped—that some day humans would abandon envy. Love? No, she believes that the most important thing is having a vocation. Well, Zhenya, perhaps you don’t exist? What if you are just a voice? 

Zhenya’s voice is bright, youthful enthusiastic, and reads verses by Boris Pasternak; the very Boris Pasternak whose Doctor Zhivago was banned a decade prior, who was forced to renounce his Nobel Prize, whose funeral, nevertheless, became a public demonstration, despite the KGB’s best attempts; the very Boris Pasternak who would not be rehabilitated until 1980. The historian Vladislav Zubok has dubbed this generation “Zhivago’s Children,” and July Rain affirms this moniker. In these phone calls is contained the soul, if one were to speak in Russian terms, of the movie: the thing that doesn’t so much propel it, as anchor it, even if this anchor struggles to catch. And it is not what is said during these conversations—like much of the film’s dialogue, these conversations are referential, gently torn out of context, suggesting other conversations to which the viewer is not privy—but how it is said; the hope with which these fragmented expressions of idealism are imbued. Communism might arrive yet. 

In his reminiscences about the film’s making, Anatoly Grebnev, the co-author of its script, recalls July Rain’s origins as Khutsiev coming to him with an idea: a young man gets caught in the rain and hides from it in a phone booth — whom will he call? This tangential style of filmmaking, offering narrative so much space to breathe that it would inevitably slip out the door before the audience even noticed, was a common feature of Thaw-era filmmaking (Georgiy Daneliya’s film I Walk The Streets of Moscow, similarly, was conceived from a singular vignette: a girl walks barefoot in the park in the summer rain, a boy circles around her on a bike). Khutsiev’s approach, much like the naturalistic techniques employed by the auteurs of Italian Neorealism or the French New Wave, took its origins in principles pioneered by early Soviet filmmakers, such as Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye and the montage theories of Sergei Eisenstein. But while west of the iron curtain this was geared towards considering the proverbial kitchen sink with an unflinching eye, by the time of Khruschev’s Thaw this oblique vérité in the Soviet Union was a form of indirect resistance to the dictums of the committees presiding over all that was officially deemed to be art. By turning the camera towards the stream of life, filmmakers could avoid accusations of iconoclasm; if the film doesn’t offer an obvious critique, who is to say that it is not a paean to Soviet dailiness? These were the artistic freedoms of the Thaw: irony, plausible deniability. 

July Rain is the last in what one might informally refer to as Khutsiev’s Thaw trilogy, following Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956) and The Ilyich Gates (1965). The first is a film about a young woman, a teacher from Moscow, who is sent out into an industrial town to teach the local factory workers at evening school, where she, a member of the Soviet capital’s intelligentsia, reluctantly falls in love with a welder—in a scene at the culmination of the film we see her marveling at the modernist splendor of the factory, where her beloved works, surrounded by sparks and steel that glows like lava. The Ilyich Gates, which for reasons of censorship entered the world with the title I Am Twenty, follows the recently demobilized Sergei, who returns to Moscow after his two years of mandatory service, searching for a direction in life commensurate with the sense of purpose of his parents generation—those who fought in the Great Patriotic War. Its final scenes feature one of the protagonists toasting to the humble potato, listing among the things about which he feels seriously the Revolution, The Internationale, 1937, soldiers, the war, “that almost none of us here have fathers,” and coming face to face with his own father in a dream. He asks for advice, and his father responds that Sergei is older now than his father ever got to be. July Rain portrays the same generational cohort, only ten years later—what their searching has led them to is, we see, empty chatter, self-interest, and disillusionment.

Together, the films form an arc of the Thaw, as it was lived by the intelligentsia, i.e. by Khutsiev and his peers: from enchantment and hope about socialism without the cult of personality to an echo in an empty room asking: is this all there is? Khutsiev was well-respected in artistic circles and had solid professional relationships within the Soviet studio system; nevertheless, the success of his films from Ilych Gates onwards was hampered by censorship: throttled releases and limited admission to the box office. When Khutsiev was invited to show July Rain at the Venice Film Festival, Soviet authorities vetoed the film’s submission. 

To Khruschev and his apparatus, Khutsiev and his milieu had extracted all the wrong lessons from his efforts to rid the Soviet people of the cult of Stalin’s personality, their allegiance to humanist individualism wrong-headed and disrespectful to the benevolent paternalism of their elders. If all of this seems ideologically incongruous, it is worth considering that what is known today as de-Stalinization takes root in Khrushchev’s personal resentments and the resultant power struggle he coordinated. Khutsiev and Grebnev completed work on the script on October 15, 1964, a day after Khrushchev’s removal from power. They hadn’t heard yet; a friend had arrived with a celebratory bottle of vodka to the dacha where they sequestered themselves to write, frantically bearing the news. They had not known that what they were working on was an elegy to this brief period of apparent liberalization, though they must have had a feeling.

 In the original draft of the script the phone conversations between Lena and Zhenya are expanded, take more of a central place and reveal the most about Khutsiev’s intentions for the film. “When a person meets another person—that is always a hopeful thing,” Zhenya says in one of the conversations that did not make it into the film. He was breaking up—“Do you hear me? I want for everything to be real, I want to be able to die for my friend or to do something big, greater than our own fates. I am tired of the chatter that consumes everything, the noise in which words lose their meaning. Lena, I have to see you!” 

What are the materials from which Lena and Zhenya are made? Lena—a red vibrant cloth, a Young Pioneer’s neckerchief or maybe a flag, waving at the gates of an abandoned pioneer camp. Zhenya is made of not much more than soap and water. Bubbles.

***

The breaking point of the film is the scene that was first filmed. In the late fall, Volodya takes Lena with him to a forest picnic with Shapovalov. The much-talked-about, ruthless academic advisor turns out to be a convivial man of later middle age, with a smooth face, a cozy sweater, and a black beret, his wife a matronly version of him. There is Vladik, there is Alik with his new, fresh-faced date Lyusya, and another man, tall and broad-chested, in a hunter’s jacket and a handkerchief tied around his neck, as if he were an adventuring aristocrat. The conversation ranges across the globe: inventory is taken of the world’s various grilling traditions  and it is concluded that “each nation gets the shashlik it deserves;” two doctors from Kyiv, Vladik tells everyone, have been injecting themselves with curare poison with the objective of finding an antidote to it, but anyway, the Japanese Fugu fish is the more poisonous creature; isometric exercise takes root in Yogic traditions and Vladik recommends it to everyone. Suddenly, a shriek—Shapovalov’s wife is horrified as she sees Volodya emerge from the cold water of the lake. “You’ll catch pneumonia, I can’t look at this,” she says, giggling, as she directs a Super 8 camera at his bare torso. “Well, this isn’t the Yangtze, the current is much milder,” says the adventuring aristocrat. Shapovalov chuckles, “It’s unfair—you’re demonstrating the advantages of youth!”

Lena, we notice, has an absent look in her eyes, irritation bubbling somewhere below. Earlier, as everyone disperses in the woods for mushroom picking, Lena bumps into Alik. She asks if this date of his is an athlete too, if he is as loyal to his guitar as he is to women. He tells her that the guitar is in the car, both of which are borrowed, and that behind her sharp remark, she must be concealing her good regard for him. Volodya intercepts them and jokingly tells Alik that they now have to duel; Alik laments that contemporary customs don’t suppose that anyone is ready to die for pride or principles. “Now, when you meet someone who has wronged you again, you ask them how’ve you been man, and they’ll respond well, and you? We live in an era of peaceful coexistence.” As if to say: what is there to live for now? As they sit around the fire, while the conversation continues apace, Lena leans to him. “I really do hold you in high regard,” she says. “Will you do me a favor and not play or sing tonight?” The nature of this request is unclear; perhaps Lena is testing what happens when there isn’t diversion. But Alik nods, and, when inevitably he is asked to sing and play, he excuses himself by telling everyone that he did not take his guitar with him, that he cannot sing without it. 

What happens without the diversion of his singing? Everyone plays word games. Lyusya proposes that they go around the circle, recounting scary stories. The adventuring aristocrat tells a story from his travels in Cambodia, a flat tire on the way to an audience with the king. Lena sneers. “What about you, Alik?” she asks, “have you ever injected yourself with curare venom?” His face remains serious, and with contemplation, he tells her that no, he had not. Tamping his pipe, he continues: “I’ve been fortunate to deal with much more pleasant things in my life. With lilacs, for instance.” With a faint smirk he tells everyone about how once, he had spent four days in a lilac bush. “There was only one minor inconvenience: we were surrounded by their tanks, and ahead was a minefield we laid.” The flower bunches were large, obstructing the gunsight. Since then, he has hated lilacs. What was the point of the story, the others ask. “What I don’t know, I can’t know,” shrugs Alik.

The evening ends as everyone is shouting Lena’s name—she has gone missing. The door of Volodya’s car opens and in a metallic tone she lets them know that she’s there; she does not say that she has simply had enough. They drive home in silence. When they get to the city she tells Volodya not to call her. 

From here the film rolls: Lena has chosen solitude, sitting at home, listening to the radio as she does work for her translation side-gig. She goes to work; she walks the streets of Moscow. There is one more conversation with Zhenya, which concludes with them expressing gratitude to each other—what for is not made explicit. On her way to canvas for the municipal elections, she runs into Volodya on the street. He tells her that he has completed the paper he and Lyova were working on. Shapovalov, however, is the author if one were to believe the cover page. She responds that the rumors had made their way to her, that she had heard from Lyova, who retracted his participation from the project, taking a principled stance against intellectual fraud. He asks her to go away on vacation with him. She is dismissive at first, but he charms her by joining in on the canvassing.

They go away to the seaside, where they seem bored, their interactions stilted, mostly silent. The final time we see them together, they talk, looking straight ahead instead of at each other. He proposes to her,  acknowledging that this had taken him a long time, that he knows his evasion had been hurtful. “Should we go to the place where they make people happy?” he asks, implying the registry office. “What if I want to stay independent?” she asks in response. She refers back to her cousin’s questions at her father’s wake, tells him that despite the fact that he is not an alcoholic, or a womanizer, despite his humor and easy-going nature, she would never be able to explain to the cousin why she will not marry him. She does not explain to us either, but it’s laid bare in the awkward, icy distance between their shoulders, a view of Moscow blanketed with fog filling this space. 

By turning the camera towards the stream of life, filmmakers could avoid accusations of iconoclasm; if the film doesn’t offer an obvious critique, who is to say that it is not a paean to Soviet dailiness?

In the final scene, we are once again in the central plazas of Moscow, watching Lena as she strolls through the city. It is the 9th of May and long before Victory Day became a pompous military parade, televised nationwide. Reaching Theatre Square, she finds herself in a crowd of men of middle age and older. Grey-haired, some flash gold-toothed smiles, others are in uniform, everyone is hugging. She spots Alik in this crowd, participating in the celebration; he does not see her. Finally, a montage of the faces of the youths watching all of this. Young, concerned faces with sharp gazes—the future. 

***

In the barest terms, one could describe the film as about a young woman approaching the edge of her thirties, reassessing her choices, struggling to decide how she would like to live the rest of her life. If one were to have attachment to plot, one might describe it as a film about falling out of love. If one was attached to readings, one might describe it as a film about self-reliance, or independence, or female emancipation. Or maybe it is a film about sincerity? Echoing the central theme that preoccupied artists of the Thaw, the era itself taking its name from Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel universally acknowledged as unremarkable and yet paradoxically imprinted in history: set in an industrial town, at its center the conflict between two painters—a successful careerist churning out soulless socialist realist cliché, and a talented but starving artist unable to make a living with his landscapes, in which are distilled the pain and beauty he sees in the world. 

As true as all of these descriptions may be, isolating one as central would offer an impoverished view of the film or what is beautiful about it, which is that it doesn’t set out to be about anything. The film is perhaps best viewed as a contemplation, a process, rather than a sealed work of art. In examining through their characters its creators’ own Soviet idealism, what the film really captures is life’s subtle and often devastating ironies, which in themselves are always durational—for them to become discernible, time needs to pass. The real marvel of the film is the patience with which it is constructed, the patience coursing through it. If it says anything at all, it is the phrase only time will tell, its movement as close to life as its narrative confines allow. Perhaps, the film is best described as a reality-check caught on film, an implicit acknowledgement that hopeful as spring may be, a thaw always brings with it sleet, dirt, and mud to wade through. Perhaps this is why it has aged so well against the crawl of history.