Brief Encounters [1967]

 Kira Muratova, best known for Asthenic Syndrome, made her solo directorial debut with Brief Encounters, after a couple of films co-directed with her husband Aleksandr Muratov. Made at Odessa Film Studio during the “Khrushchev thaw”, this freewheeling, idiosyncratic and loosely-strung work exhibited her love for the French Nouvelle Vague and its radical figurehead Jean-Luc Godard. Like her dazzling next film The Long Farewell – which was even more avant-garde and formally eccentric – this earned the displeasure of the state censors for being too individualistic, and remained suppressed for the next two decades. Its delicately weaved love triangle – between pragmatic, unsentimental and bourgeoise city council planner Valentina (played by Muratova herself with deadpan poise); her free-spirited, vagabond husband Maxim (played by legendary Soviet folk singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotskiy), a traveling geologist who loves strumming his guitar; and Nadia (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman from the countryside who Maxim met at a roadside café, and who’s incidentally now hired by Valentina as a domestic help at her sprawling apartment – is told through a mosaic of impressionistic perspectives, flashbacks and digressive allusions. The diffused B/W images, along with music splashes and fragmentary conversations, imbued the film with poetic-realism and a meditative air. These, in turn, were complemented by sardonic moments, like when Valentina is coaxed into attending a conference bearing no relevance to her work, or when she muses “To wash [the dishes] or not to wash them? – turning the grand Macbethian dilemma into comically banal – or when she adamantly ignores the pleas of families to classify the newly constructed public housing buildings as hospitable. Most interestingly, Muratova impishly subverted expectations by never having the two women find out about their shared love interest.

Director: Kira Muratova

Genre: Romantic Drama/Marriage Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Ukraine (erstwhile USSR)