This film is for some reason designated on the site as a children's, although there is nothing childish in it. He is rather adolescent and youthful both in the nature of the disclosure of his topic and on the basis of the plot. A very young guy performed by an equally young, still a student, and not an established actor, Sergei Nikonenko undergoes an inevitable initiation into adulthood. He is drawn by the sea, although he knows nothing about it and is full of illusions and fantasies in the spirit of almost the works of Alexander Green. However, the reality turns out to be quite different, although in the end it turns out not to be the complete opposite of dreams, but simply an adult life, which is significantly more complex and ambiguous than it once seemed.
Actually, the plot canvas of the film easily fits into such a logic of the “novel of growing up and upbringing”. To the credit of the film’s authors, they shot rather not a harsh didactic, but a slightly lyrical picture, as if illustrating the maxim “All works are good, choose to taste” inevitable for the Soviet state.
But over the years, a completely different layer is revealed in the film. The aesthetics of the maritime profession are compared here with the tendency of escapism, or, as we would now say, downshifting, which gradually and increasingly embraces the generation of the sixties. Indeed, going to the sea, taiga or mountains, repeatedly noted including in the cinema, became a classic substitute for at least some semblance of serious social criticism, at that time impossible. Already in the 70s, the ranks of the intelligentsia will be covered by a real apathy, but so far it is still far away, and it is symptomatic that peaceful fishermen go to sea to the accompaniment of the song of Bulat Okudzhava; a song that is seemingly romantic, but poetic at all not the work of Soviet fishermen, but paradoxically the very escape from reality to which this film seems so optimistically calls.