Your classic art movie - the red head girl is pursuing a remarkably durable and buoyant red balloon, when her cow-milking rail worker "master" croaks in the background of the grey, 'scope frame. This is not going to be a fun movie.
The conventions of the "serious" Russian cinema get topped up with a dose of seventies feminism, as the girl slave-wife asserts herself, burying her keeper and using his milk churn of money to acquire a dog, a goat and a flat screen TV, rejecting the rugged single father truck driver in favour of raising an orphan that she recruits from her old institution and takes away in the row boat she has been tarring throughout the picture. Guaranteed festival prize winner.
The minimal plot is tricked out with vista shots of isolation & misery occasionally disrupted, as when the strain makes an unscheduled stop disgorging passengers who are taken with her appearance in the scarlet suit. Miss Kutepova manages to work up some interest, playing it all po-faced in her first major role.
Murky Ruskie colour of the kind we hoped we had seen the end of with glasnost. The film is too long and too slow but has mood and craft skill going for it. The raunchy bits help.
What happens to the TV?
