Kreutzer Sonata

A conversation struck up on a train journey turns by degrees into a confession. The man telling it opens his marriage, his jealousy and the working of his own mind to the person opposite, who for the most part stays silent. The film rests on Leo Tolstoy’s book of the same name and keeps the form of its source: at the centre is not an event but the act of telling. Its great length is owed to that choice; scenes are left to run to their end rather than cut, and the viewer is pressed in beside the man speaking. The account neither confirms nor denies what he says, and never lets us forget that he is the only source. Oleg Yankovskiy plays the lead in the hundred and fifty eight minute Soviet film by Mikhail Shveitser and Sofiya Milkina, completed in 1987.