Perhaps, this is Herman's best film, although although everyone are welcome to enjoy his other works even more. The film was "put on the shelf" i. E. temporarily banned in the USSR, then rehabilitated and received a state award, which really shows the rapid changes the Soviet Union was going through with every decade.
Unfortunately, the film is most often considered extremely one-sided by critics and viewers. Namely, as a kind of hyper-realistic live photography. Some even compare Hermann with Trier and Dogma. I think this is wrong, because Hermann was making movies about the past. History. But the point is not in the genre, but in the special attention to all peculiarities of the time in which the characters live.
But Herman's documentation would not have been true if he had not grasped the main thing - the ambivalence, the internal split of that time, which, however, did not go away. The film is not documentary, it is accurate in essence. A revived photograph and a story about the horrors of that time - cruelty, poverty, wretched collective life is mixed with amazing almost fabulous fantasy and beauty. Incredibly beautiful people, incredibly pure thoughts, the protagonist's sincere mythical fantasies about the Garden...
Herman did not create the deconstruction of the Soviet myth at all, as some critics think. He made a film about the duality of human nature and all time in general... where the terrible is closely intertwined with fabulous dreams... the film does not suffer from flat realism - Well, in what other movie have you seen such noble NKVDists as Lapshin? Such wonderful honest journalists as Khanin? The film still has a strong sense of romanticism to it.
Herman made a film primarily about his father. It was from Herman's point of view that he was a survivor of such hard times. However, the character of Herman's father does not play the pivotal role in the story, like Lapshin.
In this film, actors Boltnev and Ruslanova are more similar to Master and Margarita than to a provincial Soviet NKVDist and a provincial theatre actress. A very charming and memorable pair.
9 out of 10.
