Long happy life (film, 1966)

A bus carrying a group of young people suddenly slows down: the driver seats a man voting on the road. In the cabin, Victor ( Kirill Lavrov ) is next to Lena ( Inna Gulaya ). A non-binding and at the same time confidential conversation is tied between young people: Lena talks about her teenage love, Victor - about how he lived at a high-altitude station in childhood.

A bus enters the city and stops near a local club. Today there is a lot of people - the poster informs that the Moscow Art Theater has arrived in their small town, and the " Cherry Orchard " will be shown. Lena invites a new acquaintance to the performance, but he does not have time to answer - Lena is carried away by her friends in her arms. Victor goes to the hairdresser, and when he returns, the action has already begun, there are no tickets, and he has to enter the club through the window.

He finds Lena, they dance at intermission, talk, and eventually leave the play. Victor escorts Lena, says that something important has changed in his life after their meeting, promises to introduce his mother in Kuibyshev. Victor wants to go to Lena, but she says that her daughter Lisa is sleeping at home, Lena refuses and immediately go to Victor, who stopped at the floating base. In the morning, while Victor was still sleeping, Lena with suitcases and a small daughter appeared at the floating base and said that she was ready to leave work today and go with him, temporarily leaving her daughter with her mother. But something is subtly changing. Joint morning breakfast is stressful. When the situation becomes quite awkward, Victor says that he needs to call, gets up and leaves. After some time, the hero rides on the bus and looks at the river, along which the barge stretches for a long time.

Immediately after the release of the screen, the film was perplexing not only among the audience, but also among specialists in the field of cinema. According to Lyubov Arkus , editor-in-chief of the Session magazine, at the premiere in 1966, the picture was unfriendly: “the plot was exhausted, and the barge swam and swam, infinitely long, the contemporaries could not stand the nerves” ^[2] . The film expert Georgy Kapralov in a review on the pages of Pravda reproached the screenwriter for his inability to explain and deeply analyze “a certain life conflict” ^[3] .

The fact that the tape became an event not only in Shpalikov’s biography, but also in the history of Russian cinema, began to be discussed after decades. So, Dmitry Bykov ( Novaya Gazeta ) noted that, despite quotes and borrowings (the same barge was inspired by Vigo's aesthetics), the painting has its own Shpalikov style ^[4] . Evgeny Gabrilovich and Pavel Finn wrote about the director's gift multiplied by cinematic professionalism in the preface to the collection of his scripts ^[5] .

A separate analysis was awarded to the work of the operator Dmitry Meskhiev . Natalia Adamenko (“Cinema Notes”) explained in detail how camera techniques - light contrasts, reflections, smoke, diffusion - made it possible to establish emotional contact with the audience. According to Adamenko, the creators of “A Long Happy Life” were on the verge of new discoveries in the cinema - “the associativity of the poetic image and the image of the pictorial are closer to each other than ever” ^[6] .

The expressiveness of the frames, which are “woven from many nuances and midtones”, was mentioned in the review of the magazine “ Cinema Art ” ^[7] . The story of a failed love, reminiscent of a sketch with clean, transparent colors, was seen in the tape by a columnist of the Ekran-90 publication ^[8] .

Ella Korsunskaya, who worked for many years as an editor at Mosfilm , said that receiving a prize in Bergamo was perceived at the studio as a triumph. The directorial debut deserved to be continued, but when Gennady Shpalikov sent an application for the production of the film “ Boring Story ” to the Arts Council, which he planned to shoot in the same delicate, nagging style as “Long Happy Life”, he was refused ^[9] .

Shpalikov’s picture was the final point in the development of the thaw cinema, cinema expert Valery Fomin stated ^[10] . This was confirmed by Andrei Konchalovsky , who discovered in the “Long Happy Life” both a premonition of an era of stagnation and farewell to the romantic ideals of youth ^[11] .

• Gennady Shpalikov - screenwriter, director
• Dmitry Meskhiev - operator
• Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov - composer
• Boris Bykov - artist
• Irina Chernyakhovskaya - sound engineer

• Information about the film on the page "Encyclopedia of domestic cinema"