Country: URSS
Year: 1967
Duration: 107'
Lena is thirty years old and about to get married but she is going
through a moment of crisis with her fiancé and can't give a name to the feeling
of emptiness that surrounds her. Thanks to the companionship of her friends,
she is able to mitigate part of her dissatisfaction, but in the long run she is
tired of a life made of study, chit-chat, and evenings on the town. She only
finds refuge in phone calls with a stranger she met by chance during a summer
thunderstorm. An iconic film of the stagnation during the Brezhnev era, the
portrait of a generation of Muscovites who are lost in their own dreams and
deprived of a future.
Biography
film director
Marlen Khutsiev
(Tbilisi, Georgia, 1925 - Moscow, Russia, 2019) graduated from VGIK, the Pan-Russian State University of Film S. A. Gerasimov, and debuted in feature films in 1956 with Spring on Zarechnaya Street. During the 1960s, he
found both success and censorship with I Am Twenty (1965),
awarded in Venice, and July Rain (1967), both of which
expressed the climate of “detente” of the Khrushchev era and the following
Brezhnev season. A pupil of Mikhail Romm, in 1974 he and Elem Klimov completed the film of reminiscences And Still I Believe…, which
remained unfinished after his maestro's death. Later, although involved above
all in television, he returned to film with the dramas Epilogue (1983) and Infinity (1992), which received the Alfred Bauer Award in Berlin. In 2015, during a complete retrospective of his films, he received a Leopard Career Award at the Locarno Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
Gradostroiteli (cm, 1950), Vesnà na
Zarécnoj ùlice (Primavera in via Zaréčnaja,
1956), Dva Fyodora (I due Fëdor,
1958), Mne dvadcat'let (Ho vent'anni,
1965), Iyulskiy dozhd (Pioggia di
luglio, 1967), Byl mesyats may (Era
il mese di maggio, tv, 1970), Alyy parus
Parizha (The Scarlet Sail of Paris, tv doc,
1971), I vsyo-taky ya veryu... (Eppure
credo..., coregia Michail Romm, Elem Klimov, doc, 1974), Poslesloviye (Epilogo, 1983), Beskonechnost (Infinitas, 1992), Lyudi 1941 goda (People of 1941, doc,
2001), Venice 70: Future Reloaded (ep. In
perpetuum infinituum, cm, 2013).
Declaration
film director
“What I try to show in my movies are the feelings I remember from prewar Moscow. I always lived downtown and when, after the war, I finally returned to the city, I found another world. July Rain and I Am Twenty were inspired by walks I took in that period. In the first one, I wanted to give a feeling of distance, as though the actress was captured by chance in the crowd and the movie camera began to follow her like any other passer-by.”
Cast
& Credits
DIRECTOR: Marlen Khutsiev. SCREENPLAY: Anatoli Grebnev, Marlen Khutsiev. CINEMATOGRAPHY:
German Lavrov. FILM EDITING: A. Abramova. SET DESIGN: Georgi Kolganov. MUSIC: Bulat Okudzhava. SOUND: Boris Vengerovsky. CAST: Evgeniya Uralova, Aleksandr Belyavskiy, Yuriy Vizbor, Evgeniya Kozyreva, Aleksandr Mitta, Ilya Bylinkin, Yuri Ilchuk, Alla Pokrovskaya, Boris Belousov, Viktoriya Beskova, Valentina Sharykina, Vitaliy Belyakov. PRODUCTION: Mosfilm, Tvorcheskoe Obedinienie Pisateley i Kinorabotnikov.
CONTACTS: Mosfilm, Elena Orel orel@mosfilm.ru
