Station and horizons Measuring kilometers with monotonous knocking of steel and cast iron, a tireless fast train rushes past fields, semi-tanks and cities. Along the narrow passage carries a cart with tentacle products, similar to the boy Olga Koreneva, who left a second-grader son at a distant Ferzikovo station, whose father resembles only a tattoo, bred in his youth with a trembling hand. Upon returning from the next flight, the girl learns sad news: the great-grandmother who brought up Anton died, and the mother and son were left without a roof over their heads. Without daring to be cunning, director Boris Yashin put a simple metaphor into the title of the picture, comparing life with a fast train following the same route. So Oli’s son will have to go to the boarding school, where she once studied herself, waiting for the return of a single mother working on the railway.
Fate is the same schedule: sooner or later, the composition will arrive at the desired station, but the main character, it seems, did not have time to go on her own. Gifted by talent, the ticket to a better life remained uncomposted, as did many Soviet children whose parents could not afford to spend on dreams. Systematically depriving Olga of prospects, the authors of the film, however, create a light, shrouded in the haze of light sadness image. Opposing a life that forces her to grow up with new blows, the girl remains a yesterday’s child who loves her job and tries not to hold grudges even against her unloved, incredibly nervous mother. And only looks into the distance with the sad eyes of Elena Mayorova, as if she wants to see a better world beyond the horizon, and quietly dreams of something else, only she does not know what. The anxiety of the heroine, inappropriate in her life, managed to convey the shrill play of the actress, who also threw herself and died in the fire ten years after the “Speed Train”.
The picture, surprisingly poor in honest men, reflects the difficult fates of women railway workers who believed, believe or simply tired of believing. That’s just Yashin is not Menshov, and “Speed Train” is not a large-scale deep canvas, but only a modest sketch with great potential. Touching and strong episodes are interspersed with optional monologues, and the strongest emotional message of the first half is replaced by emptiness in the second. The dramatic tone, which could not be sustained until the end, compensates for the era of the 80s, blossoming with the violent color of deficit and perestroika crisis. Depicted almost completely - from the outback to the big cities - the country braves, although experiencing not the best times, like visitors to the restaurant car, dining for the last penny.
The Rapid Train paints a hectic, hectic world where everyone rushes nonstop and crowds in lines in fear of missing out. In the anthills of communal apartments, numerous tenants are scrambling, at the wake of an old lady-neighbor deciding how to settle her room themselves, so as not to yield to people from the outside. Forced into one jar, like sprats, they remain each by themselves, like Olya, devoid, contrary to her name, of strong roots and unable to replace the house with a train. The complete antipode of the house in Frezikovo is the paradise found by the heroine on the other end of the country - an apartment where even the sausage eaten by neighbors does not touch, and numerous tenants are ready to take a random stranger into their large family. This new, incredibly cozy world emphasizes the incorrectness of the first and the presence of another chance for happiness for the heroine.
Condemning a buy-sell society, Olga thinks about the main dilemma of any worker who has to run every day, every week and all his life, doing something that does not bring joy. Hands and feet are constrained by the need to feed themselves and their son, and the growing whirlpool is taking away from him. Denying the intricate complexity of fate with his simplistic story, Yashin offers an option in which to press the internal stop faucet, stopping the eternal run, perhaps. But real life is darker than a drama from the 80s, because you have to run on your rails straight to the end station.
