Love by Request

Igor is a former athlete; his life has fallen apart, he drinks, and he does not much care about the work that pays him. Vera works in a library, quiet, the kind of woman nobody notices. One day the two of them make a strange agreement: they will deliberately try to fall in love with each other. Vera takes it seriously, like a method. Igor finds it amusing at first. Sergey Mikaelyan's film was very popular in the Soviet Union in 1982. Oleg Yankovskiy plays Igor and Evgeniya Glushenko plays Vera; Glushenko won the best actress award in Berlin for the part. The idea is comic, but the film does not mock it: two people deliberately trying to change themselves ends up actually changing them.