With and without you (film, 1973)

The village girl Stesha (Marina Neyolova) lives easily and peacefully. She has a loving mother ( Maya Bulgakova ) and fiance Ivan Sukhanov ( Stanislav Borodokin ) - an activist in the agricultural cooperative. True, lovers walk around the village together infrequently: Ivan is constantly busy with public affairs. This workload prevents the young man from seeing the ardent glances cast at Stesha by the resident of the far farm Fedor Bazyrin (Juozas Budraitis).

Once Fedor arranges for the abduction of someone else’s bride: he throws the girl into the cart and, not paying attention to her cries and protests, brings her to her own house. The furious Stesha first arranges a rout in the "wolf den" of the farmer, beats pots and utensils; then, huddled in a corner, listens to his confessions all night. In the morning, when Ivan, accompanied by police, gets to the farm, the girl goes out onto the porch and announces that from now on she is not Stesha, but Stepanida Bazyrina.

Soon Fedor goes to the bazaar. Having successfully sold the goods, he goes along the mall, choosing gifts for his beloved. Having returned home, he takes out outfits from a big box - dresses, shoes, scarfs. Stesha was moved: no one ever spoiled her like this stern laconic man. Wanting to brag of new clothes in front of her friends, the girl goes to her native village. Having met Ivan, who cannot reconcile with the departure of the bride, she explains that from now on she will live her own life.

Life on the farm contains a lot: in autumn and winter, Stesha, feeling cut off from the world, looks out the window for a long time; in the summer she is happy to manage household affairs. The only thing that worries her and her husband is the rumors constantly flying to them that if the family does not enroll in the collective farm, then Fedor will be poisoned for deportation.

One day they receive an official invitation to appear at a meeting of the artel. Stesha herself goes to the village. At the meeting, her next meeting with Ivan takes place. Hearing from Sukhanov that Fyodor clings too tightly to his farm, the girl claims that she, having paired in the old days, now wants to feel like a real mistress. However, Fedor no longer expects a quiet life: he takes away utensils from the yard and shelters livestock in the forest. After one of the quarrels, Stesha collects his things and returns to the village. Bazyrin, whom memories of a short family happiness do not give rest, leaves the house and goes after his wife.

• Rodion Nakhapetov - Director
• Alexander Popov, Mikhail Zhestev - script
• Sergey Zaitsev - operator
• Ivan Plastinkin - artist
• Bogdan Trotsyuk - composer
• Veniamin Kirshenbaum - sound engineer

In the early 1970s, a young graduate of VGIK Rodion Nakhapetov was asked to shoot a picture on Mosfilm based on the novel by Mikhail Zhestev , Stepanida Bazyrina. “The social drama of collectivization” seemed to the novice director infinitely far from his vital interests. Therefore, after reading the script, he decided to shift his emphasis and create a love story on the screen ^[1] :

First of all, Nakhapetov transferred the action from the northern latitudes to the Central Russian strip, the summer landscapes of which added a ribbon of poetry ^[2] . The next step related to the choice of actors surprised many. The director invited Juozas Budraitis to the role of the farmer Fedor, and Marina Neyolova offered the role of the village girl Stesha. When the head of the art association, Yuli Raizman, saw a screen test, he asked him to remove Neyolova from the role: Stepanida, according to the plot, was a type of Kustodiev woman, and the fragile actress did not fit into the canons of “village beauty”. Nakhapetov refused to replace. Later, when the tape was ready, Ryzman admitted the correctness of the young colleague ^[1] .

As Nakhapetov later recalled, improvisation was very important for him during the filming, therefore, working with actors, he “often extended the frame in order to fetch something unexpected, unprogrammed, fresh” ^[1] .

One of the first detailed reviews of the newly released picture was published in the journal “The Art of Cinema ” (1974, No. 12). The literary critic Lev Anninsky in his article called the film "the most curious." The critic noted the “tangibility” of the texture, the rarest - against the backdrop of the strictly realistic cinema of those years - the lyricism and festivity of the “rural typology” ^[2] .

The review ended with a rebuke to the director, for whom the social upheavals of the early 1930s became just a "background": "It turns out that you can lower the story to the level of melodrama" ^[2] .

Years later, film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev called Anninsky’s rebuke “in vain”. According to Kudryavtsev, the director set himself another task: he wanted to talk about "the inability for a person to live apart from other people." Separately, the work of Marina Neyolova was noted, which played the village girl organically and convincingly. In the finale of the tape, when Stesha says goodbye to her husband, implicitly guessing that he will follow, Kudryavtsev saw a certain loop in the plot: “now Fedor was“ kidnapped ”- in the name of love, his own soul” ^[3] .

• 1973 - San Francisco International Film Festival
• 1975 - World Film Forum in Belgrade (Marina Neyolova - Audience Jury Prize)
• 1976 - Film Festival in Brussels (Golden Femina Award)