Maria's Lovers

Ivan survives a Japanese prisoner of war camp and comes home to his town outside Pittsburgh. He marries Maria, whom he has loved since childhood. But what happened to him in the war will not let go, and he cannot touch his wife; he does not think himself worthy of her. The marriage rots in that silence, and other men start circling Maria. It was Andrei Konchalovsky's first American film, bringing the eye he had formed in Soviet cinema to a small American town. What sets it apart is that it handles melodramatic material coldly and at a distance. Nastassja Kinski and John Savage lead, with Robert Mitchum in the cast. It opened the Venice Film Festival in 1984.