Ty i ya by Larisa Shepitko (co-written by Gennady Shpalikov) is a story about 3 long-time friends, medical scientists of some sort, who met again after many years of estrangement. Petr came to Alexander in seek of help: he was suddenly hit by midlife crisis, and he didn’t know what to do; Petr, however, couldn’t help him, because the visit brought up too many memories, old regrets, unfulfilled desires, – he basically went into existential crisis himself. He called their mutual friend Katya, whom he haven’t talked to in years, they reconnected, and something sparkled there. Petr, in the meantime, boarded a random train and just followed the stream – he met some new people, and went with them after they get off the train, to, eventually, accept a position of a surgeon in a local medical facility, because that’s how he could help people the best.
This is pretty much a classic soviet drama, the good sort: it deals with things on the level of personal relationships between individuals, avoiding any kind of clarity on communal or societal levels: for example, nobody cares to explain who are the people Petr met and why do they have to exist in circumstances that they do exist in, – they simply exist, like a permanent entity of life. By concentrating so closely on the three-way relationship between the characters (and their handling of whatever is happening to them), the writers managed to create a deep and consistent story; by blurring away everything that doesn’t belong to this small story, they managed to make it seem significant.
It’s not without drawbacks, though: the execution in general seemed to me a little awkward (except for acting); but more importantly, I didn’t get any closure – save for the 1st scene, the film consists of 2 storylines that don’t really crosscut with each other but rather develop independently, and I would’ve appreciated some kind of continuity link in the finale. Also, it’s very unclear what were the experimental treatments they performed on dogs back in the days, and what happened to the dog that survived – not that it’s very important for the plot, but still.
All in all, it’s a decent drama that seems to be unfairly forgotten. It definitely has an advantage not many soviet movies can boast with: there is not a hint of ideology there, it’s a plain human tragedy, unspoiled and undiluted, and it should be celebrated more as such.
Time: 01:37:19
Released in: 1971
Directed by: Larisa Shepitko
Written by: Gennady Shpalikov, Larisa Shepitko
Performed by: Leonid Dyachkov, Yuriy Vizbor, Alla Demidova, Natalya Bondarchuk, Leonid Markov, Vladimir Nosik, Lidiya Konstantinova, Oleg Efremov, Aleksandr Yanvaryov, Viktor Shulgin, Mstislav Zapashnyy
Entertaining quality: 4- out of 5
Art quality: 5- out of 5
IMDB page: link
®shoomow, 2017
Cinegmatic 