Domestic Circumstances

A young couple have a baby and the flat suddenly gets crowded. The grandmother moves in to look after the child, the mother-in-law wants her say as well, and everybody has an opinion, a rule and a complaint. The family starts changing flats, swapping them and settling again. Meanwhile something unexpected turns up: the older generation have love stories of their own. Aleksei Korenev's Soviet comedy, made for television, uses the housing shortage of the period as its engine: who lives where is a family question here. A good deal of the dialogue turned into lines people still quote. Galina Polskikh, Yevgeniya Khanayeva and Yevgeny Yevstigneyev are the familiar faces in the cast. It is one of those productions that has been rebroadcast in Russia for years and watched by successive generations.