Flights in Dreams And in Reality
– On the eve of his fortieth anniversary Sergei Makarov looks back at his life and learns that he has ..
On the eve of his fortieth anniversary Sergei Makarov looks back at his life and learns that he has achieved nothing. He was not able to be happy and to bring happiness to the closest people in his life, neither to his long-suffering wife nor young mistress nor friends nor work... It is about the men who never grew up and could not find themselves in the time of stagnation – gifted, charming, but infantile and lost, they never were able to realize themselves...
17 Jan 1983
Russian
Roman Balayan
Viktor Merezhko
Oleg Yankovskiy, Lyudmila Gurchenko, Oleg Tabakov, Lyudmila Ivanova
Sergey is an attractive man approaching forty who is acutely aware that nothing he has achieved during the better part of his life has brought him any satisfaction. His frantic sprints between his work, his lover and his family, and the constant lies he uses to explain his absence, only tighten the noose around his neck. The three days that separate him from the Big 40 might present an opportunity to change everything, or he might just lose it all instead.... The Soviet update of the literary concept of the "superfluous man," filmed at the end of the Brezhnev Stagnation, was Balayan's most successful title. It was here that he first engaged Oleg Yankovsky, an actor who subsequently appeared in the majority of the director's films; without guile or pathos, he captures the existential dimension and contradictions of the morally questionable hero. The film surprisingly eluded the narrow gaze of the remorseless censors and was thus able to present audiences with a faithful portrayal of the social paralysis that befell the pre-perestroika era. Balayan's plans for a sequel set in the rip-roaring world of 1990s capitalism were abandoned.