Nikolai Gudz

Sergey meets girls at the sea that he, allegedly working in a prestigious profession (he is either a pilot, flying abroad, or an employee of Vneshtorg), easily succeeds. He is interested in a woman sitting alone on the beach with a parrot in a cage. She is not particularly inclined to get acquainted, but eagerly talks about her son - a round honors student who was even shown to a professor from the Novosibirsk Academgorodok. Here, Sergei meets a terribly impudent guy who knows who he actually works.

The film is based on the stories Anton Chekhov. It is a tribute to the actor Boris Andreyev. He plays a major role that keeps up for the duration of the film. Lively and intelligent Valery Spout largely mitigates underline the drama of the protagonist, while Michael Sveta's role, though small, is bright and memorable.

“It is simply a fortunate coincidence that this film survived years of censorship during the Soviet ’60s and was finally released at the end of the ’80s. The director made it together with his students, and this cover of being a film school project made the entire production possible. The film presents the horror of war as an existential drama, which radically differs from the traditional Soviet approach, in which war is presented almost exclusively through the prism of patriotic pathos.” –Sergei Loznitsa