Valentina Telichkina Movies
- 1992
Based on a true story, this fast-paced light comedy follows the antics of a couple of sharpsters bent on making a quick profit in 1961 Russia. At that time, the currency was being revalued downward, so that 100 old rubles would equal 10 new ones. Everyone had to exchange their old paper money for the new currency. However, coins would retain their full value. Naturally, anyone eager to multiply his money like these two would quickly exchange cash for coins. Considering himself too important to run around the countryside conning coins from rural hayseeds, the originator of this idea sends his reliable associate, a young mute, driving through the countryside along with a persuasive (if often drunk) interpreter. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Vladimir A. Ilyin, Andrei Ponomarev, (more)
- 1983
Director and writer Gleb Panfilov adapted Maxim Gorky's play Vassa Zheleznova for this theatrical film that recounts Vassa's iron rule over a dissipated merchant family several years before the 1917 revolution. When her profligate husband is about to be hauled into court for an act of moral turpitude, Vassa (Inna Churikova) convinces him to commit suicide before he ruins the entire family and their fortune. After he concedes and dies, Vassa spies on everyone in the household and tries to keep her self-indulgent daughters and a high-society brother from harming the family's interest or holdings. Then her Jewish daughter-in-law Rachel (Valentina Telichkina) arrives from Switzerland with news that Vassa's son is dying, and she wants to take their own son, now in Vassa's care, back home with her. The two woman clash in a climactic showdown, and the unexpected result of their altercation sets off a chain of events that presages the grand-scale, 1917 "showdown" to come. This film won the Gold Medal top prize at the 1983 Moscow Film Festival. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Inna Churikova, Vadim Mikhailov, (more)
- 1979
This nostalgic comedy drama is set during the time of "communal apartments" in the 1950s, when very diverse people had to share pre-revolutionary apartments. Here, a woman who lives in such an apartment in Moscow has likeable neighbors who always come to her at the wrong moment to watch TV. She is an independent, emancipated woman. She meets an ambitious engineer from the provinces whom she likes, but things are not perfect between them and there are frequent breakups, which are not eased by having the neighbors almost literally in their laps most of the time. This very popular film is based on a play by Alexander Volodin. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Lyudmila Gurchenko, Stanislav Lyubshin, (more)
- 1977
Grigori Chukrai is well-respected director, known in the West for his films Clear Skies and Ballad of a Soldier. Netipichnaya Istoriya, the original title, translates as "An Atypical Story," but the film was soon retitled Tryasina, which means "Quagmire." It shows how mother's blind love transforms her son into a deserter, bringing the boy to a kind of moral and social death. During World War Two, a widow is about to lose her only son to the military. Unable to bear that kind of loss, she engineers an accident just as she is taking him to the train station to begin his enlistment. Secretly, she takes her now helpless son back to her village home, and becomes an eccentric hermit in the eyes of the villagers, rarely venturing outside the house. At home, the boy becomes deeply dependent on her, even though they snipe and jab at one another in an incessant war for dominance. Years after the war has ended, his mother dies suddently of a heart attack. The boy has now become a pale, wizened bag of bones, and emerges from the house like some creature from the depths of the sea. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Nonna Mordyukova, Vadim Spiridonov, (more)
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