Director: Kira Muratova
Country: Soviet Union
Award: none
Movement: none
It is the sixth feature film directed by Muratova, and arguably her masterpiece, most important film and best known film. The film was entered into the 40th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Silver Bear - Special Jury Prize. It also won 1991 Nika Award in Russia. The film consists of two parts: the first part is shot in black-and-white and the second in color. In the first part Natasha, the main character, was in her husband's funeral when she suddenly lost control over her states of extreme rage and despair. She walked away from the funeral and began to treat everybody provocatively and aggressively. After resigning from the hospital where she was a doctor, she seeks sex from two random strangers. The first is met with confusion and anger, but the second results in a fling that she regrets, panicking once he goes to kiss her. At the end, Natasha finally regains herself and is able to accept an act of kindness from a stranger. We then realize that the first part was a film screening in a theater as the second part starts. Shot in color, the second part has its protagonist an exhausted and disillusioned school teacher Nikolai who fell asleep at the screening of the black-and-white film. The audience ignores the screener's plea to stay for the Q&A with the film’s actress ("Olga Serghjevna") and leave the theater disorderly and raucously. (Muratova ironically mocks the general public’s response to her own films.)[6] This sleeping schoolteacher awakens and leaves the theatre, but falls asleep again in the overcrowded subway and then at a meeting at school. The film suggests that as a result of personal predicaments and problems at work Nikolai has gotten the Asthenic Syndrome – he falls asleep at the most inappropriate times. (“Asthenia” means “a lack of strength, diminution of vital power, weakness, debility,” according to the OED.)[3] He is admitted to the hospital for the mentally ill where he gains the understanding that the people around him there are not any crazier than those who live in freedom. After some time he is released and he ends up falling asleep on the subway. The empty wagon takes away the sleeping man into a dark tunnel.
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