A fire of hope I am once again convinced that special effects, bare bodies, mate are, of course, important cinematic techniques (although in recent years they have been abused to cover up unprofessionalism and hacking), but without them you can make a high-quality, quality film that leaves with a lot of reflections and impressions.
“Light in the window” is a very Soviet film. He is Soviet kind, pleasant, quality. But he is also sovietly poignant, even heartbreaking. There are almost no semitones, no preparation of the viewer, strokes of the canvas are sometimes very sharp, straightforward. The viewer does not chew anything - and so it should be! It should be, because you have to live with the characters of their difficult year. Growing up with Rita. Keeping peace in the house and in her head with her father. Be sensitive and compassionate with Irina. At the same time, the film is quite stingy on emotions. They're all in the audience. Here it is, mastery.
The plot of the picture is devoted not so much, thank God, a frequent, but still quite real situation. Family: father, two daughters – teenager Rita and newborn Lena – were left without a mother who died in childbirth. Life is different now. Rita (Margarita Sergecheva), perhaps for the first time encounters the adult world, where there are losses, where people learn to accept them (and there there is a forced cynicism – she understands, hearing the conversations of friends of parents coming from the funeral), where you yourself become responsible for your life. And the journey is hard, Rita doesn't grow up overnight. First, she blames her younger sister for the death of her mother, then desperately, with fury, rushes to care and care for her; sacrifices herself, and then expects such victims from relatives. This avoidance of reality and the posture of the martyr become the girl’s life style. It's not her fault - none of us know how to behave in such terrible conditions.
But Rita was lucky, I think, very lucky. She has an understanding, kind, attentive father (Yuri Solomin), who tries his best not to give up, not to bend under the reproaches of a bragging and hostile mother-in-law (Lyudmila Ivanova), who can also be understood, although her behavior does not seem reasonable. His grief is no less great, but he is always with his family - he does not drink bitter, does not "hang" with friends (what a foreign word, it is not here at all...), does not dump children on the same mother-in-law.
And Rita got lucky with a friend. She, of course, morally very quickly outgrown him, but he is not infantile at all - through the restraint of emotions you can see how he sympathizes with the girl. And it is he who tells Rita about her excessive sacrifice. And she called it single-celled, I'm sure she came back to it anyway. Because he is also her support.
And now in their lives there is another lonely soul - nurse Irina (Tamara Degtyareva). She almost completely dissolves in, in fact, a strange family, which she, as a district, probably a lot. It's the homely atmosphere she's been looking for for years. Even where grief has recently occurred, there is still a light in the window.
Rita faces a difficult dilemma. She is categorical, like a teenager, but she loves her father immensely, although she does not express it in any way. “Letting someone else’s woman (albeit a caring, economic, hearty one) into the house means betraying your mother.” But to forbid the Pope to live on - to betray him himself. It’s not an easy choice, but Rita is very wise.
I never cease to admire such pearls of Soviet cinema. Yes, there are roughnesses, shortcomings (for example, Lyudmila Ivanova is still unlikely to be suitable for Solomin’s mother-in-law by age), but they more than pay off with advantages. All without exception, the actors showed a top class, amazing work. In one look at Rita’s portrait of her mother, in one position of her father in the kitchen on New Year’s Eve, in one attempt by Irina to hold back tears from Rita’s bitter words, there are so many emotions that no current screaming and beeping-eyed actor from Russian cinema can express.
It’s after these movies that you feel a little better. And ready to make the world a better place. And after such films and in your window lights a fire of hope.
10 out of 10.