Finding yourself I never look for a movie to watch on the rating, because a high rating is not a guarantee of quality. In addition, a high “green” rating does not always coincide with your internal preferences. Most often I focus on the writer, who, due to his creative nature, rarely changes his personal choice. Soviet marine writer Konstantin Ignatievich Kudievsky forever tied his fate to the sea. On the eve of the war he graduated from the Odessa Naval Special School. During the war he served in the Navy. In 1946 he graduated from the Higher Naval School and served on one of the ships of the Northern Fleet. All 5 films based on his scripts are related to the sea. For Kudievsky, the sea is precisely the element that makes the strong even stronger, and forces the weak to rise to the level of the strong.
At first glance, the plot of the painting “Falling frost” is unassuming and even in some ways unremarkable. But that's only at first glance. All the stories written by Kudievsky have several layers of understanding. For all its apparent simplicity, Falling Snow has a profound meaning. The topic of finding a homeland is a sore question for people who have what is called “neither a cola nor a yard.” Hans (Stepan Olekseenko) is just such a homeless tramp, running around the world in search of a home. Once he considered the wounded German officer his father, but then it turned out that this was not so, and the young Hans was confused. Now he had no family or home. Pain and despair began to freeze his soul, like the icy frost from the title of the film. The winding paths of life led him to a fishing village, where a lonely woman Silvana (Ninel Myshkova) offered him her shelter to “feed” from the sea together.
An ordinary melodramatic story, if not for the black and white, almost abstract retrospections present in the picture, taking Hans either into the real past or into materialized dreams. When these flashes of insight appear on the screen for the first time, the viewer wonders: why are they? Episode after episode leads to an understanding of the true drama of Hans, who is not Hans at all, because he speaks Russian in delusions. When Hans finds out, he loses his peace. On the one hand, Silvana and her son, to whom he attached all his heart, and on the other hand, the opportunity to find not only his homeland, but also a real family, which he was deprived of for a quarter of a century. I do not want to condemn Hans, but I do not undertake to justify him. Such important issues a person decides himself. Just yourself.
There are 2 emotional poles in the picture. The first is Hans, in search of his homeland. The second is Silvana's desire for personal happiness. If for Hans Homeland is an abstract concept, almost unattainable, then for Silvana happiness is a concrete and quite tangible value: a son, a beloved man, hard work, but necessary for survival. Some may think that Ninel Konstantinovna Myshkova “did not show” herself in this role. I don't think so. Many of her roles are Ilmen-tsarevna in Sadko (1952), Lydia Volchaninova in House with Mezzanine (1960), Olga Zotova in Viper (1965), etc. Ninel Konstantinovna proved that she is capable of unexpected reincarnations. In the case of Silvana, this was not necessary. Myshkova played here exactly the type of woman who fully corresponded to the story - an ordinary woman, with a natural desire to be happy.