A weak adaptation of a great book I. Grekova’s novel The Chair is one of the pearls of late Soviet literature. Bright, lively characters, well-written details, excellent language, paradoxically combining mathematical accuracy and artistic imagery. And the fact that this novel decided to film – quite natural.
But filmed, alas, not too successfully. The original book of I. Grekova contains several intertwined storylines, stories from the lives of employees and students of the department - and in the film they tried to reflect all of them at least in the edge, at least a couple of minutes of screen time (unless the line of Asi Umanskaya was completely left behind the scenes). And screen time is limited - and as a result, the storylines had to be ruthlessly cut, leave the consequences in the film, taking the reasons out of brackets ... Every single scene, every single episode is very good. Excellent acting, excellent scenography, perfectly selected details. But together they do not converge, breaking up into a heap of video illustrations for the book.
As a result, the potential of the book, the work of the actors and the crew, is realized at best by half. A person who has not read the book will appreciate at best half of the director’s ideas. And the person who read the book, on the contrary, will stumble on too many voids, motifs and events, closely adjacent to the scenes shown on the screen, but placed outside the brackets of the film adaptation. Shame. . .