Encore, once more encore!
Colour, 10 reels, 2766 meters long
Screenwriter and Director
PETR TODOROVSKY
Designer
VALENTIN KONOVALOV
Producer
MIRA TODOROVSKAYA
Production
“KRUG” STUDIO (“MOSFILM”), “MYRABEL STUDIO”
Casting
VALENTIN GAFT, IRINA ROZANOVA, YEVGENY MIRONOV, YELENA YAKOVLEVA, SERGEY NIKONENKO
:
I wanted to tell my
youth. The happiest years of my life I spent in the Army. Of course, there was
front, my friends were being killed and I have seen many fearful things. But the
Army drilled me to be self- controlled and patient to grit my teeth, not to
whimper and not to cry.
…It is the beginning of the 50-es. The Army is
returning from defeated Germany. A snow-covered cantonment. The Army has seen
the other life in Germany. An ordinary rural house has refrigerator, a bath and
toilet. A paved path leads to every farm. And at home? Squalid barracks,
miserable way of life. How’s that? We shattered fascism, we dreamed of happy
life but at home – just mad incense to the only man ( as if Stalin alone won the
war !), squealing, fear. A worthless “smershman”, a “rear rat” turns out be more
important than a front-line colonel, unit commander, a Hero of the Soviet Union.
On the contrary, the War past sergeant is sent to the prison camp because he was
slandered by a typist of the Special Branch whom he doesn’t want to spend the
night with… That is probably the people are drinking so much there – because of
the abusive disparity between the dream and reality, of the impossibility to
change anything.
But nevertheless I was shooting film about love.
About one lieutenant who fell in love with a young beautiful wife of a colonel.
And this colonel also lives between the hammer and the anvil: he has two wives –
the old one from the prewar times and the younger one whom he met at the front
and fell in loves over head and ears. And remorse, and painful doubts, and
suspicious glances of people. Just a shot in the temple can cut this
knot…
“Nike” Prize of the Russian Academy of
Motion Picture Art for the best fiction picture in 1992; for the best screenplay
at The International Film Festival in Tokyo in 1993; this picture was awarded a
Prize at The Russian Film Festival “Constellation-93”; the Grand Prize at the
open “Kinotavr” at Sochy (1993)
