Letters to Elsa

A young woman, Olga, lives in a country estate with her husband, a businessman, whom she calls Duncan. The husband is constantly busy at work, and in his absence Olga draws, composes poems, does herbariums and writes letters to the mysterious Elsa about the everyday events taking place in her life.

Once during a walk, a woman stumbles upon a wandering puppet theater . Acquaintance with the puppeteer Kolya, who himself plays all the roles in his performances, is truly mesmerizing, and in the evening Olga shares her impressions with Duncan. The next day, she discovers that in the place of the booth - the ashes. The puppeteer disappears. And after some time, the husband dies.

An unadapted woman is left alone, and the cook Maria, who relocates her whole family to a large house, cleverly uses this. At night, fleeing from the harassment of Alexei’s Mary’s son-in-law, Olga runs ashore and jumps aboard the departing warship. So her wanderings begin.

In this chain of misadventures, acquaintance with the driver of Bones stands apart. Upon learning that the woman has nowhere to live, he brings her to his bachelor apartment, sets the table and offers to marry him. Conflicts between spouses arise almost immediately after the wedding, and they are connected with the fact that Kostya expects tasty dinners and a cleaned apartment from Olga, and she continues to live in a world of dreams. Thoughts about the disappeared puppeteer are not letting go of the woman, and she makes a large, beautiful butterfly with its “face” out of improvised material.

During another family quarrel, Kostya throws a butterfly out of the balcony. Carrying the wind, she sits on a tree near the place where the puppeteer Kolya was, and calls him. Now the butterfly becomes his companion and silent companion. It is the butterfly that “tells” him the way to that psychiatric clinic, which, in the end, Olga falls into. The addressee of her letters, Elsa, also lives there.

In the final of the film, Olga, Elsa and other residents of the clinic are sitting in the hospital courtyard, and Kolya and his dolls play their new performance for them.

• Julia Mavrina - Olga
• Aristarchus of Livanov - Duncan
• Zinaida Kiriyenko - cook Maria
• Alla Demidova - Elsa
• Nikolay Geiko - puppeteer Kolya (voiced by Sergey Garmash )
• Igor Lifanov - Maria Alexey’s son-in-law
• Vladimir Maslakov - Kostya
• Mikhail Trukhin - Oleg
• Ilya Shakunov - Sergey
• Vladimir Lekus - Zhenya
• Leo Eliseev - grandfather

• Director - Igor Maslennikov
• Script writer - Arkady Vysotsky
• Operator - Valery Martynov
• Artist - Mikhail Suzdalov
• Composer - Vladimir Dashkevich
• Sound producer - Mikhail Buyanov
• Costume Designer - Natalya Zamakhina
• Producer - Andrey Razumovsky

In 2000, Igor Maslennikov was a member of the jury of the script contest "Long Live the Melodrama", held under the auspices of the Goskino . The script “Butterfly”, which received the first prize, seemed very interesting to the director, and Maslennikov called his author Arkady Vysotsky with a question whether this work was involved in film production. Arkady Vladimirovich replied: “I have been offering this scenario to everyone for 5 years - nobody takes it” ^[1] .

Having received the consent of the scriptwriter, Igor Fedorovich went in search of the heroine. According to him, at first he went the wrong way - he began to look for a performer among the models. Then, the performer of the main female role in the film " Azazel " Marina Alexandrova fell into his field of vision. However, the director made the final decision after he saw the third-year student of the Petersburg Theater Academy on stage Yulia Mavrina : “I realized that my character should be just that” ^[2] .

The director in various interviews did not hide the annoyance that the picture, which he considers the best in his biography, did not reach a wide audience ^[3] . Maslennikov directly connects the unenviable fate of “Letters to Elsa” with the Russian film distribution system that collapsed in the early 2000s ^{[4] [5]} .

I enter the expert jury of Roskino and I know: a lot of money is being invested. But the rental fell out of the circle of attention. Cinema is arranged like a tree: the roots are rolling, the crown is art, the trunk feeds both of these spheres ^[6] .

- Director Igor Maslennikov

The film caused a very mixed response in the press. So, the director Alexei Balabanov , seeing “Letters to Elsa” at “ Kinotavr ”, was pleasantly surprised that the 70-year-old Maslennikov “managed to make such an energetic picture” ^[7] .

Journalist Olga Bakushinskaya , calling the film a beautiful, moving and clever story, noted that “Letters to Elsa” is “no worse, and maybe better,” than those shot by the same director “ Winter Cherry ” and “Sherlock Holmes” ^[8] .

The literary critic Lev Anninsky discovered in Maslennikov’s new work a clear roll call with classic plots. So, the main character during the horseback ride reminded him of Natasha Rostov from the film by Sergei Bondarchuk . A wandering puppeteer aroused associations with the “ Dear ” Fellini . The snappiness of the cook’s family, Maria, who seized someone else’s estate, seemed elusively related to Bunuel 's Viridiana ^[9] .

At the same time, American professor of Slavicity Vida Johnson admitted that much in her “Letters to Elsa” remained incomprehensible ^[10] :

The journalists of the newspaper “ Newspaper. Ru ”, entitled their publication“ Girl in Syrup ”and stated that“ an incredible amount of beautiful things has been added to the sweetness of the plot ” ^[11] .

• 33rd Indian International Film Festival in Delhi (2003) - Grand Prize Golden Peacock ^[12]
• Stalker Film Festival - prize for the Guild of Filmmakers "For Humanism and Reflection of Women's Fate"
• 13th Kinotavr Film Festival - Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role ( Alla Demidova )
• 24th Moscow International Film Festival - Special Prize of the Federation of Russian Film Clubs to the “Best Film of the Russian Program”
• Film award "Nika " (2003) - nomination "Best Actress in a Supporting Role"
• Golden Eagle Film Award (2003) - Best Feature Film nomination

• Information about the film in the Encyclopedia of Russian Cinema