The action takes place in a small town of Poland at the end of the Great Patriotic War. Maria (Svetlana Kryuchkova) is a young woman who earns her bread by selling cakes and moonshine, which she sells secretly. For Maria trying to hit a young district, which for the girl is not of any interest.
Once a company of Soviet troops passes through the town, which are quartered in the houses of residents of the city. Of course, there were several men attached to Mary. Among them is Ivan (George Burkov) – a joker and clearly a hoodlum (which can be understood from the conversations about him among his comrades), who tried to molest Mary at the market. Maria is invited to share dinner with the soldiers, and then Ivan spends the night with the girl, or rather, in her room. Between them there is no compromising Soviet man actions, they talk, Ivan says that in his homeland he has no one left. And in the morning, jokingly calls her his wife in front of everyone, marks on his distinctive badge that in the event of his death, his things will be transferred to Mary - since she is his wife, and goes on to fight. And this joke will eventually turn into the fact that the news of the death of Ivan will come, and everyone will honor Maria as the wife of a war hero, although everyone in the town knows perfectly well that he was not her husband.
I missed everything in this movie. In theory, if this is about wartime, there should be drama, but there was no drama as such, or rather, there was no drama in the usual sense. The viewer seemed to think up many moments, many dialogues, many feelings of the characters, seeing some isolated episodes from the lives of the characters. Here is Mary crying in winter - and it has just been summer, so you must think that she has been in sorrow for six months. Here the boys ran to the mined castle, and then carry the body of the dead young man who saved them, and the faces of all sad, so the tragedy occurred, well, it seems, it was not particularly shown.
Everything. And I could not feel the loneliness of Mary, nor her desire to give warmth to even an orphan boy taken from an orphanage, nor her attitude to the district, nor the feelings of the district, nor Ivan could understand. The only thing that was good, in my opinion, was the last minutes when Maria felt deceived, this bitterness from Ivan’s joke, which was not a joke for her, because she had been living with her for almost a year. Otherwise, the picture seemed poorly glued mosaic, as if the director was told to cut many unnecessary scenes, according to the editors, for the sake of observing a certain screen time.