Strong, deep, multifaceted, philosophical and at the same time live film.
Excellent direction and play. Excellent camera work - without "beautiful", but very organic. A brilliant cast (Smoktunovsky, Demidova, Gundareva, Simonov, Stupka, Lazarev, Nevzorov, etc.). And of course, the music of Isaac Schwartz.
Without pathos and any propaganda, sad, with irony, then bright, then very dramatic, always very psychological, multi-layered, completely devoid of vulgarity and falsehood, the film is touching, intelligent, truthful.
Men so different, so fragile, so blind, yet so wise, so monstrously far apart and so necessary to each other, are but the cells of one organism. Their monstrous mistakes are so understandable, so intimate and so familiar. But how do they coexist, how do they interact? To understand, to hear each other on a family scale, in a close circle, on a society scale is such a simple and complex formula of happiness.
Brother is a man with a microscope, sister is a man with a telescope. The airy, smart, observant wife that still exists? A proud artist who divides the public into elite and plebs. And another brother and sister are crushed, snorted grief, but, having worn out, did not cease to seek love, to reach for the pure and beautiful, because, as the song says, “love cannot be taken from the soul.” But how to love, how to see who is next to you when you are constantly looking through magnifying glasses? How to help, how to learn and not forget to hear, love, how not to be selfish? How is it that in the pursuit of the high and the far, one does not trample one’s neighbors? Who is righteous, righteous, righteous, righteous, and righteous? If you preach humanism, act. And be kind to love people as they are, with all their vices and shortcomings - dirty, because the devil himself will love them clean.
But society is already divided. And yesterday's gentlemen, who, to the misfortune, found themselves in the sight of an angry crowd, are waiting for stones, sticks and fists. The beginning of the century is an era of change.
Despite the tragic twists of the plot and the fact that ugly, unhealthy social phenomena are affected (alas, they exist now and always), the film breathes great love for man and humanity.
A wonderful adaptation of the play of the same name by M. Gorky (1905).
10 out of 10