Deeply social film with 'fashionable' then documentary inserts - interviews with children from boarding schools and orphanages, which from the very beginning could set the viewer to the ordinary ' chernukha' of that time of cinema or the usual pathosous official agitation for all good against all bad. But the film passes between these extremes in artistic truth without falling into either naturalism or preceptive scholasticism.
Showing the lives of children from an orphanage, in the prism of their relationship with the adult world, through the relationship between a criminal investigator and a runner from an orphanage, whose acquaintance began with the capture of the latter in an apartment theft. Moreover, if the moral boundary about taking someone else from these guys is absent - then the general direction of thought is quite within the framework of morality - ' Theft' was carried out not for profit, but only with hunger - products and nothing else took the character of Vladimir Sychev from that apartment.
Further, the plot involves conflicts, numerous but not deeply filled - between the world of a police officer and the world, we can say semi-criminal, children from an orphanage. And the involvement of a more or less deep life remote from the profession brings conflicts to the main work. But the hero of Rostotsky continues to be interested in the lives of the guys, which unexpectedly gives him a solid & #39; hangover & #39; and in the investigation of one of the next cases. .
What else attracted the film except as a melodramatic show of the relationship between the adult and child world is the subtle directing and acting. When from the first minutes of life in the frame of the character of Alexander Potapov do not believe his sincerity and mentally scolded both the actor and the director for ' not feeling' situation - at the end of the plot you see the explanations for this filigree liner. Or the emotionally executed role of Anatoly Vasilyev is not at all characteristic of the role of weak-charactered, good-natured intellectuals, who strengthened behind him. Here the actor presented us with a dense-monolithic-low-level male character, poorly educated but holding on to the most powerful pillars & #39; concepts of honesty and dishonor. Powerfully played beyond recognition of the actor, so well conveyed feelings and meanings facial expressions and intonations, poses and not verbally.
Of the obvious dissonances - well, all such a director of the children's home - is aware and immersed in the lives of children - and thrive ' hazing' and 'concept'.
7 out of 10