It is felt that the film was made by the theatrical director, who sought by means of cinema to enhance the effects characteristically “theatrical”, expressed by actor’s plasticity, etc. – for example, at a group of musicians in the baronial castle of Munchausen or at a soldering curled around Polishchuk, sang as a show puppet. Brilliant in the image of reasonable Leonid Broneva.
The film is mined with ambiguities and winks, for the late Brezhnev years very politically incorrect, from the mouth of Yankovsky about the impact of sharpness on life expectancy, in the explanation of Churikova naive Koreneva about the fact that the truth does not exist at all, and completely dispelled in a fuzzy episode, when Igor Kvasha reports, using energetic facial expressions for greater secrecy, that he is also not enthusiastic about our calendar. It looks like all this is a vivid evidence of the then capital-intellectual with a fig in his pocket subtly fronting, which Mark Zakharov, being a recognized and deserved artist, allowed himself sometimes, apparently, and publicly - in 1988, exhaling, probably, it finally out of himself in the film "Kill the Dragon".
And without understanding the subtexts and contexts, in the 80s, the film felt very emotionally, especially the silent – and piercing – dialogues of Koreneva and Yankovsky.