Five Evenings

The end of the 1950s. Aleksandr comes to the city where he lived before the war. Looking out of a friend's window he sees a building he knows and decides to drop in for fifteen minutes. Tamara, the love of his youth, lives in that flat. They parted twenty years ago; the war came between them. Over five evenings they talk. Nikita Mikhalkov's film is adapted from Aleksandr Volodin's play of the same name. Almost all of it takes place indoors and rests on conversation. Lyudmila Gurchenko and Stanislav Lyubshin take the leads. The telling does not describe the lost years in large statements; it watches what two people manage to say and what they cannot. The tone is warm and rueful at once.