It Doesn't Hurt Me

Three young architects in Petersburg are looking for work and go to a wealthy woman's flat to design an interior. Tata lives extravagantly, is capricious and has money; she is a businessman's mistress. One of the architects, Misha, falls in love with her. She takes up the relationship and leaves her own circle. Then the narrative changes direction: Tata is seriously ill and has told nobody. Aleksei Balabanov directs. Renata Litvinova plays Tata and Alexander Yatsenko plays Misha, with Dmitri Dyuzhev and Nikita Mikhalkov in the cast. Balabanov was known in Russia for hard crime films; this is among the works in which he changed register, and it begins almost as a romantic comedy. The structure is deliberately misleading. The first half is light and funny; when the illness appears in the second, the same scenes take on another meaning in retrospect. Renata Litvinova acts in a manner of her own in Russian cinema; the way she speaks and stands defines the whole character and the film uses it. Petersburg is not shown as a tourist city; empty streets, summer houses and building sites are inside the narrative. Its limit is that the script accelerates in the second half and some characters disappear. Who it is for: viewers who like Russian independent cinema and narratives that switch genre. Who it is not for: the tone is uneven, the second half slides into melodrama, and the characters' motives are not always clear.