East of the West 2001 / Prichadi na meňa pasmatreť / Russia 2001
The title of the work on which the film is based, While She Died, defines the vagaries and mood of this simple drama dealing with late love. An ill mother doesn’t want to die knowing that her already grown daughter will become an old maid. To put her mother’s soul at ease, the daughter asks a man who accidentally knocks at their door if she can introduce him to her mother as her date. This seems all the more reasonable as he has arrived holding a bouquet intended for his much younger sweetheart living next door. The man is persuaded. The dying mother’s aristocratic manner soon so enchants him that, to the daugh-ter’s displeasure, he begins to act his role with enthusiasm. His next visit, interrupted by telephone messages from his spurned girlfriend, takes place in an atmosphere of anticipated excitement. The mother visibly revives, the daughter panics and thinks up a quick solution: she asks a local salesgirl to pretend to be her illegitimate child.
109 min / Black & white, 35 mm
Director Oleg Yankovsky, Mikhail Agranovich
/ Screenplay Naděžda Ptuškina
/ Dir. of Photography Michail Agranovič
/ Music Vadim Bibergan
/ Editor Olga Grinshpun
/ Producer Michail Zilbermann, Vladimir Repnikov, I. Tolstunov, V. Grammatikov
/ Production NTV - Profit , Gorkij Film Studios
/ Cast Oleg Jankovskij, Irina Kupčenko, Jekatěrina Vasilijeva, Natalija Šukina, Ivan Jankovskij, Mark Rudinštejn
Oleg Yankovsky (b. 1944) began his acting career in his home town of Saratov (1965-73) and since 1968 has been considered one of Russia’s most popular movie stars. He gave strong performances in Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1974) and Nostalgia (1983); in Balayan’s Flights of Fantasy and Reality (1982), in Shveytser’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1987); in Shakhnazarov’s Assassin of the Tsar (1991), among others. Since 1973 he has performed at Lenin’s Komsomol Theatre in Moscow, and during the nineties had engagements in France. In recent years he has held the honourable post of president of the Open Russian Festival in Sochi. The film Come to Look at Me (2000, Prikhodi na menia postmotreť), in which he stars, is his debut as a director; cinematographer Mikhail Agranovich also worked on the film as co-director.
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