Alexandr Belyavsky Movies

It is not altogether surprising that Russia's entry in Czechoslovakia's Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 1958 was Stories About Lenin. The anecdotal storyline begins with Vladimir Lenin's flight into Finland in 1917, and concludes with his ascension to power in the Soviet Union. Director Sergei Yutkevich inventively combines color photography with black-and-white, the better to accommodate vintage newsreel footage. The role of Lenin is played by M. Pastukhova, who certainly looks the part. Stories About Lenin is the second half of a two-part film; Part One was not released internationally, and reportedly isn't quite as well made. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

A woman is forced to examine the emptiness of her life in this stark drama from the Soviet Union. Lena (Yevgenya Uralova) is a woman in her late twenties who loves her boyfriend (Aleksandr Belyavsky) but in time comes to see that their relationship serves no useful function. What's more, she sees that her friends are for the most part empty-headed lackeys, causing her to wonder just what is the point of her life. Director Marlen Khutsiev, who previously made the well-received I Am Twenty, displays a strong stylistic debt to Michelangelo Antonioni in this feature, which received one of its few screenings (since its original release in 1967) at the 2000 Locarno Film Festival as part of a retrospective on Soviet filmmaking. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This modestly budgeted, made-for-TV romantic comedy became one of the most popular films in the former Soviet Union and a staple of TV broadcasts on New Year's Eve. It's based on the premise that modern apartment complexes look so much alike that one cannot distinguish one city from another. On New Year's Eve, Muscovite Yevgeny Lukashin (Andrei Myagkov) finally dares to make a marriage proposal to Galya (Olga Naumenko). They plan to celebrate the New Year together quietly, but Lukashin's friends convince him that first he should attend their annual meeting at a bathhouse. The meeting quickly turns into an improvisational bachelor party for Yevgeny. Having consumed large amounts of alcohol, they cannot remember which one of them was supposed to fly to Leningrad to meet his wife. So they put the sleepy Lukashin on a plane. Upon his arrival in the Leningrad airport, Yevgeny gives the taxi driver his Moscow street address and the cab takes him to an apartment complex located on a street with the same name. The building looks very much like his own, so Lukashin, still not quite sober, does not realize that he is in another city. He enters someone else's apartment because his key fits the door lock and he quickly falls asleep on a couch. When the apartment's rightful resident, Nadya (Polish actress Barbara Brylska), comes home, she wakes up the intruder and tells him to get out. The bewildered Yevgeny insists that he is at home and she is the one who should get out. Eventually he sobers and finds out about his predicament. He is about to leave when the situation is further complicated by the arrival of Nadya's straight-laced fiancé Ippolit (Yuri Yakovlev) who does not believe in Lukashin's story and accuses Nadya of being unfaithful. The interaction between the three characters results in Nadya and Yevgeny's gradual falling in love with each other. ~ Yuri German, Rovi