Accidental joys

Andrei Konchalovsky began to come up with a script for a comedy retro film called “Unexpected Joys” with Gennady Shpalikov for actress Inna Gulaya , wife Shpalikov, who was somewhat similar to Vera Kholodnaya, but finished it with Friedrich Gorenstein and Yevgeny Kharitonov. Konchalovsky recommended Khamdamov, recently graduated from VGIK , Mosfilm CEO Nikolai Sizov as a director for the future film. During the filming of Konchalovsky, and then Khamdamov was summoned to the Arts Council and asked to explain in which scenario he was making the film. Khamdamov replied that he did not like the approved version of the script and wanted to shoot “his story,” but when he was asked to provide a synopsis, he stopped filming and left for Tashkent. After that, Konchalovsky gave the film to Nikita Mikhalkov. ^[one]

The film was shot in 1972-1974. After a planned film washout, only three fragments of working materials were preserved (“The Story of the Director Osip Prokudin-Gorsky”, “Talk on the Stairs” and “Talk on the Highway”). ^[2] Later, these fragments were included in Hamdamov’s first completed feature film “ Anna Karamazoff ” (1991), where they are shown as “the film in the film” (the film that the character of Jeanne Moreau watches in the cinema).

The events of the Civil War in Russia do not allow members of the film crew from Moscow to continue shooting the silent film “Slave of Love”, which takes place in Crimea . The main role in the film directed by Osip Prokudin-Gorsky (Emanuel Vitorgan) should be played by the movie star Vera Nikolaevna (Elena Solovey), who has two twin children and her sister Nadezhda (Natalya Leble) who is very similar to her. During a forced break, actors wander around the studio in costumes of past centuries. Director Prokudin-Gorsky collects carpets, is interested in mysticism, in particular, the philosophy of George Gurdjieff , and dreams of saving Russia. The old man who repairs carpets tells him a legend about a magic carpet that can give the kingdom peace and prosperity for a hundred years if the blood of an innocent person is spilled on it. This carpet used to belong to the emir from Bukhara , but now it is in the Crimea and can be found. Together with his sisters, Prokudin-Gorsky buys a carpet from a fish merchant (Tatyana Samoilova) and talks about how he wants to lay a carpet on the battlefield in order to stop the fratricidal war. Vera and Nadezhda initially refuse to believe in the belief, but Prokudin-Gorsky manages to convince them to ask a friend of the white general Grishin-Almazov to bring the carpet to the front. There, Prokudin-Gorsky dies under the blows of a saber and falls on the carpet, but the war does not stop. During the funeral, the sisters quarrel, Vera Nikolaevna begins a nervous fever and she soon dies too. Hope cuts the carpet into two parts and buries them in the graves of Prokudin-Gorsky and Vera. ^[3]

Hope takes the children and decides to return to Moscow. When the train passes along the coast past the destroyed film factory, they see a woman (Tatyana Samoilova) who sneaked into the studio and dressed in the costume of Diana the huntress. A woman climbs a rock and shoots an arrow in the direction of the sun. ^[4] Almost twenty years later, with a similar scene, Hamdamov’s next film, Anna Karamazoff , will begin.

• Elena Solovey - Vera Nikolaevna
• Natalia Leble - Nadezhda Nikolaevna, sister of Vera
• Emanuel Vitorgan - director Osip Yurievich Prokudin-Gorsky
• Yuri Nazarov - White General Alexei Grishin-Almazov
• Tatyana Samoilova - a merchant from whom they buy a carpet / Diana-hunter
• Oleg Yankovsky - actor Lesha Kanin

• The surviving fragments of the movie on YouTube : part 1 , part 2