Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears (1980)

Winner of the Best Foreign film Oscar for 1980, this is a strong even fascinating portrait of everyday life in the Soviet Union. One of a select few films that can legitimately be described as 'bitter-sweet', this movie follows three friends and there successes and failures in love from the late 1950's to the late 1970's. Film has an epic scope in terms of the expanse of time covered, but is still intimate and lightly melancholic. You believe the lead three as friends, and there is something honest and true (yet still a little on the romantic side) about how there lives play out.

One couple who starts out in a promising situation, the husband is a beloved hockey star, ends up hobbled by the mans fall in the alcoholism, which ironically turns out to be caused by the defect of his primary virtue. Another couple has a consistently strong relationship, they love each other, have realistic ambitions and are the success story of the three. The final and primary of the three leads Katernia (played the beautiful Vera Alentova) gets pregnant by a man who abandons her, and claims no responsibility do to a reluctant deception on her part. Toughened by her experience of abandonment, single mother Katernia works hard and by the lat 1970's has become a successful business director and member of the Moscow city council. She finds a late chance for love in the form of a tool and die maker played by Aleksey Batalov. Batalove's is a fun character, he knows what he wants, likes to cook, has an engaging personality and wry philosophy of life, though he's a little uncomfortably wed to traditional male concepts of how a relationship should be. Also Natalya Vavilova, who plays Katernias daughter, looks remarkably young considering she was twenty when she played her part (she honestly looks 14 or 15).

This movie has an old chestnut of a story line in following the bond between friends, and its very well done here. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is its portrayal of every day life in the Soviet Union. You see the Russians as real people, politics or ideology never seems to enter there lives, or at least the primary considerations there in. There's an honest appreciation of the societal deficiencies of life under the U.S.S.R., food shortages, bureaucracy, and the persistence of something of a class system (even while Katrina continues to sleep in a fold out sofa bed while serving in the Moscow city council). It's an engaging even endearing picture, and so unique in its setting and cultural perspective. I really enjoyed it. Grade: A