This love story starts in a posh bar at an airport and evolves over chilly hotel rooms, barren lands, under cloudy skies as to depict the inner feelings of Lara and Georgi. While the characters are somewhat stereotyped in their traits, you should watch this film as you would watch a dream. The director has a distinctive Russian style, in the heritage of great directors like Tarkovsky, with its simple, almost functionalist settings, theatrical acting, silences, and the observation of nature as a futurist filmmaker would have done in the '20s. On the other hand, contemporary Russia is very present.
The characters, despite the initial impression one might receive, are lonely and unsure, proud, but frail, and make this otherwise conventional plot a airy, delicate story. Although this is her first work, the director manages to express these feelings without resorting to excesses.
The characters, despite the initial impression one might receive, are lonely and unsure, proud, but frail, and make this otherwise conventional plot a airy, delicate story. Although this is her first work, the director manages to express these feelings without resorting to excesses.
