JULY RAIN | I Moscow International Festival of Archival Films

JULY RAIN / IIULSKIY DOZHD'

Director: Marlen Khutsiev
Cast: Evgeniya Uralova, Alexander Belyavsky, Yuri Vizbor

The Khrushchev thaw was replaced by the Brezhnev stagnation. Russian film critic Miron Chernenko called July Rain a requiem for the era, a film in which the heroes of Ilyich's Outpost not only matured by more than three years – they matured by a whole historical cataclysm. Chernenko wrote about the film as follows: “Never before Khutsiev was so close to the ideal of his cinema as in the finale of “July Rain”, in which the world really exists simultaneously in many levels, many time planes, intersecting in the most complex sound-viewing score, colliding and diverging again in the most unexpected configurations and polygons ... It is about this, about the unexpected ambiguity of the world, about the bottomlessness of history that these tense, mistrustful, prickly glances are exchanged between veterans who cry for the first time here, at the Bolshoi, in public, after a whole twenty years historical unconsciousness, and young, already beaten by school and family, already leaving in the seventies ... Khutsiev gives each of them for a moment his unblinking, alien to illusion, non-romantic and non-sentimental look, and each of them discovers another, discovers an era , history, future ... ”.

The main character of the film, Lena, is an engineer in a printing house. Her fiancé Volodya is a promising scientist. According to the ironic definition of a friend, “anti-magnetic, frost-resistant, waterproof, anti-corrosion, refractory ... does not burn in dense layers of the atmosphere.” They are about thirty. The film tells about their lives over several months: from the July rain to late autumn.