Parallel worlds Combiner Stepa and his wife Lida can not get along. She is quiet, and he is explosive, she is thoughtful, and he is active. He left her, but returned the next day. And he swears, but nothing changes. The catalyst in their relationship becomes no less strange connoisseur of beauty - a student-practice student from the city.
The famous Soviet screenwriter Viktor Merezhko has already taken up the topic of the village and the city (" Hello and Goodbye), and later it will appear (" Homeland). However, in a strange way, the “Tryn Grass” fell out of the consciousness of Soviet and even more so Russian viewers. Although completely in vain - still the topic is relevant and taken differently than in these popular films.
Parallels suggest, first of all, with “Hello and goodbye”. The melodramatic basis is represented by the same, at first glance, love triangle. Only a citizen who comes to the village is not a policeman, but a student. The husband does not go to the city, but only threatens to go there. And the wife is not a brisk and cheerful, but burdened by internal drama, a woman with three children, and a woman is quiet and without children at all.
Of course, the key theme of Viktor Ivanovich remains – the family and its crisis caused (at the first stage of the author’s work) by the rupture of urban and rural ways.
Of course, this layer was actively developed in the literature of Rasputin, Belov, Abramov and, of course, Vasily Shukshin. And although it seems to me that there is more script in Tryn Grass, but the director brought something. Sergey Nikonenko (this is his second and not the last directorial work) and in his acting career and even more so in directing was guided by the work of Vasily Makarovich. And it is felt here too - the charm of village eccentrics and not quite eccentrics, lovingly played by Nikonenko himself and Lydia. Fedoseyeva-Shukshina. By the way, the film as a whole is clearly more sympathetic to the village than to the city, which is what the villagers have.
However, there are also significant differences. “Tryn-grass” digs deeper and takes not so much external effects and an appeal to the audience’s taste for the comedy (in this the film loses), but the subtlety of the characters. They are revealed in many ways even more fully and consistently than in the same “Hello and Goodbye”. The most illustrative example: Stepan says at the beginning and end of the film essentially the same monologue, but how differently he does it.
Interestingly, the film about the kolkhoz (rural life) emphasizes the individuality and detachment of the main characters, and all three. Stepan is not moderately working and what today is called creative. The only problem is that his creativity has no vector. At the same time, it is clearly not focused on the material - the episode with the distribution of property in general illustrates a lot in rural life (our people are quite hopidomen, and therefore the hero is recognized as almost crazy). And the expressiveness of Stepan gives him a folk spirit like Lomonosov, but less purposefulness.
With his wife Lydia in general, everything is incomprehensible - the blessed, and only for good reason, the student involuntarily compared her with the Mona Lisa. By the way, this is a separate story of “Tryn-grass” – as they used to say, about raising the cultural level of our citizens. But the comparison with the Mona Lisa is not in this steppe – more important than her mystery and detachment, as some spiritual ideal. The motivation of the student in this assessment will become clear in the final. We must pay tribute to both Lydia Fedoseyeva and Nikolai Burlyaev – they very accurately played the line that separates and unites their heroes – warmth and tenderness that does not cross the boundaries of intimacy. At the same time, Lydia seems doomed to loneliness.
Loneliness, but of a different kind, is and awaits in the future the same student who is hindered by the acute perception of human principles, etc. Poor romantic and slightly "nerd", whose fate opens in one of the last scenes (in the student dormitory).
A curious moment – the screenwriter (I hope that intentionally) endowed the villagers with spontaneity and natural character. But the intelligent student was determined by the social environment and childhood trauma (hello to Freud).
As a result, there is a sense of universal alienation and parallelism in the Soviet reality - villages and cities, people and intelligentsia, and each individually among themselves. The shaking feeling of loneliness, which is difficult to overcome, for me was the main result of the film. Although the point was not put, but rather an ellipsis, which gives a field for interpretation. So it's worth a look.
And in general, the film is a Soviet manifestation of existence. There are no tragic generalizations in it, but there is a strange movement in the eternal circle of life, which is hinted at by the same initial and final monologue of Stepan. Did we know that the future is our present? Quite. Moreover, the name refers to the very Russian aimlessness. What is not an existential form?