But the romantic character played by Vasily Lanovoy, with the appearance and in the guise of either Pechorin or the Demon became an audience favorite. He met the hidden expectations of a mass audience.And so the feeling of youthful trust in the world, of merging with it, of waiting for a miracle comes to the fore. That is why the plot is formed by the journey itself, by the impressions of the space that opens wide before them.
The world flooded with light – be it sunlight or moonlight - but each time miraculously transformed by this light - itself becomes, in fact, the central character, as in the film "Journey into April". The hero is quite conventional: he is practically just a “designation” of the camera’s point of view, eagerly absorbing the stream of life.
Here, even the progressive critics of the 1960s begin to complain about the absence of topical social problems. And not only "Journey into April" or "When the Bridges are Raised" - even "I Walk Around Moscow" will not escape reproaches of being too idyllic. And the graceful Lithuanian film "When I Was a Child", which offers a story of growing up as a natural suprasocial change, in the late 1960s will be perceived by critics as an anachronism. By that time, their attention will be captured by the antipode of the "star children" - the "simple guy" from "Three Days of Viktor Chernyshev" with his attitude to life to be "like everyone else".
It turns out that the real growing up of children "not according to the rules", is just as dangerous from the point of view of fathers as real infantilism. No wonder that in the early 1970s the highly dramatic plot of the Georgian film “When Almonds Blossomed” is constructed around a symbolic forgery of a document: the father under-reports the age of his son. A new era is coming, in which there is no place for young people eager to grow up at their own discretion.
And when, in the late 1970s, in the film "Last Chance", Russian cinema unexpectedly, in a single copy, returns to the "scheme of a "hard-to-employ" hero" (as the joke went back in the years of the Thaw), the degeneration of the compulsory educational project becomes extremely clear.
Evgeny Margolit
Viktoria Elizarova