Welcome gentle readers to another installment of The Sunday Morning Movie. Today we have a wonderful saga of a film from Mosfilm, the legendary Russian production company. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears is a bitter-sweet tale of love and loneliness, accomplishment and angst.
Reviews:
letterboxd says:
some mixed messages, beautiful scenes, & many touching moments.. some bad gender dynamics, but as a period piece set in the late 50s to 70s—context does matter. it’s not a perfect film, gosha is very flawed and holds some troubling archaic views of women and their position within a family unit (which is a bummer, b/c at first he was so likeable and seemed ideal for katerina). but the real focus here is katerina whose such an incredibly written character (along with her female friends, which I loved every bit of them on film). the film is sorta bittersweet, not exactly a happy ending, but showcase some really affecting scenes that depict womanhood in such an honest way.
and
The Foreign Film Oscar winner of 1980 is a light but heartfelt melodrama, surprisingly devoid of politics or any other heavy-handed sociological and philosophical musings. There isn’t any strong central narrative, the film consists mostly of slice-of-life vignettes which showcase the girls’s personalities and everyday struggles, both professional and personal. And whenever the drama becomes too heavy there is always a funny scene around the corner to relieve any tension. Despite the two and a half hours runtime this is a fast-moving feature, although I must say that the second half has considerably better pacing than the first. Perhaps that’s because of the introduction of Gosha who is by far the most interesting character. Vladimir Menshov’s direction is still surprisingly fresh and while it’s obvious that he is sugarcoating life in the former Soviet Union, it’s still fascinating to take a glimpse of Russian society during the 50’s and the 70’s.
Cinepux says
The 1979 Soviet film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears shows a great sense of social mobility, one that stands in stark contrast to how Americans were portraying the Soviet Union at the time, and one that specifically shows women climbing ranks much more than in the US. Instead of those Ayn Randian nightmares of mindless drones who are only numbers (Anthem) or half-witted idiots who resent the successful so much that the latter have to form a secret society where they are allowed to evolve (Atlas Shrugged), we see somebody move through the ranks of a Moscow factory, all the way to the director’s position, based on her merit as an intelligent person and hard worker.
I think this is an absolutely beautiful movie. It’s sad at times but with a thread of humor woven through it. It has a moral arc but it’s realistic, not preachy. It’s a simple story but a sophisticated film. It is also a refreshing vision of Soviet society, apparently it wasn’t all breadlines and gulags as the West would have you think. It does present a vision of the Battle of the Sexes that is past it’s sell-by date but that’s really the only criticism I can offer.
Director: Vladimir Menshov
Notable Actors: Vera Alentova, Aleksey Batalov
Plot:
Part 1:
Three young women living in a worker’s dormitory in Moscow in the late 1950s are trying to plan their lives. Katerina, the heroine, is a factory worker with dreams of college. Antonina is a down to earth construction worker with humble ambitions. The firecracker of the trio is Lyudmila, a baker searching for a rising star to marry.
Katerina is asked to house sit for some relatives and Lyudmila takes the opportunity to throw a party with which she hopes to rope herself a husband. She finds a man and so does Katerina. A few months later, Katerina finds herself pregnant and rejected by the father and his family. Meanwhile Antonina has settled down and married her boyfriend and co-worker.
Katerina decides that an abortion is the only option. That doesn’t come to pass and the young friends get together in the dormitory to celebrate the birth of Aleksandra. But the party cannot last. Single motherhood is hard. Katerina tries to study at night but she cannot get enough sleep and the final scene of Part 1 leaves her crying in bed next to her infant daughter.
Part 2:
The movie now jumps ahead twenty years. The three women are still close but things have changed. Katerina is no longer a factory worker, she is the director of a factory. She has a car and a nice apartment and a beautiful teen Aleksandra. She is also dating a married man and finds her personal life unappealing. Lyudmila has been divorced and is stuck at a dead-end job as a laundress, still husband-hunting. Antonina has taken the traditional route and has three children with her husband.
Katerina’s love life is about to change, however. On a train she meets Gosha, a valued technician at a research facility in Moscow. They begin to date and she find’s herself falling deeply in love with the kind and thoughtful Gosha. The one drawback is that he has old-fashioned ideas about the sexes and work, he things that the man in a relationship should earn more than the woman. Katerina manages to hide her position from him until Aleksandra’s father comes back into her life and inadvertently reveals the fact that she is a director. Gosha, humiliated, leaves without a word and cannot be found.
Katerina is heart-broken. She has lost the love of her life. But there is hope in the form of her friends who have gathered to comfort her. Antonina’s husband sets off to find Gosha and with scant information is able to find him. He convinces Gosha to return to Katerina and the movie ends with her exclaiming that she has been looking for him for a long time. She has, in fact, been looking all her life.
