Silent day In this sketch on the theme “One day in the life of a Soviet citizen of the era of stagnation” you can meet wonderful and beloved actors; admire without exaggeration the brilliant work of the operator, who, to my surprise, did not remove anything else; discover unknown in the details of the everyday life of the Soviet plant, marvel at the living conditions of our fathers and grandfathers, who five managed to coexist on 33 square meters. m. not only but also to live, create, study, create, conquer and - relax. However, the picture clearly does not reach the declared genre of melodrama, and despite the hourly timekeeping, to call it otherwise than protracted short film the language does not turn: there is no conflict, there is no plot plot, there is no finale, even an open one, but marked a natural ending at least of the story, the excerpt from the life of the heroes that we were shown.
Without knowing the history of the creation of this film essay, I cannot reason about it quite competently (how do I know, maybe it was a special state order?); however, I did not experience any enthusiasm from watching (although I cannot complain about wasted time either). I saw a kind of Soviet television neorealism, with poetic urban landscapes at all times of the day - from bright morning to late, illuminated by lanterns, night; with heroes embodying the best of a simple Soviet citizen - hard work, moral principles, faith in people, artistic taste and attempts at creativity, unpretentiousness and unpretentiousness; with interesting diverse actors. However, the plot line is missing , which, with a good picture and beautiful actors, gives rise to bewilderment and a feeling of some understatement or untruth, - despite almost documentary realism. The film appears as a historical and cultural sketch about the everyday life of the average citizen of the USSR from the middle strip of Russia, which can be used as a visual video guide in the course of lectures on the everyday culture of mankind. Here and crunchy, in which lived our fathers and/or grandfathers; and cars, which drove the Soviet man; and a certain social specificity — the choice of professions, which were considered respectable among the Soviet men of the 70s (it is men, because the women in the film somehow bypassed: engineer, doctor, chauffeur, athlete (what a striking contrast with fashionable today IT specialists, financial analysts, managers and lawyers — more than mortals at home/br>, even in everyday workers).
A similar (in a certain sense) film “A Noisy Day” with the actors of “A Contemporary”, where a typical Soviet family of the 60s lives their typical city day, comes to mind. However, there is a conflict in this story, there are certain mental signs of the time – Khrushchev’s thaw (and not only everyday ones, as in My Sons’ Day), and the film from the sketch becomes a masterpiece, a drama about the collision of different value systems, about the collision of youth with the big adult world, about intrafamily conflicts in which such close, such loving people become so strangers to each other. "A Noisy Day" looks in one breath and at the end of the film, shocked, for a while you can not recover. "My sons' day" looks with some bewilderment and is completely forgotten after a couple of minutes. Smooth silent story about the good people of the 70s, whose lives are not overshadowed by terrorists, economic crises, drugs, treason, or even some pronounced own shortcomings. You can see, but it is not clear, why?