Station for Two

The pianist Platon has taken the blame for a fatal traffic accident caused by his wife, and while waiting for the court's decision is stranded at a provincial railway station. He and Vera, a waitress in the station restaurant, start badly. Within a few days that changes. At the end Platon is in a labour camp and has to make morning roll call, with Vera running through the snow beside him. Eldar Ryazanov directs. Oleg Basilashvili plays Platon and Lyudmila Gurchenko plays Vera. Ryazanov comes out of comedy, but this film goes somewhere other than laughter. The station restaurant, the timetable, the black market trade and the daily order of the camp show Soviet life in the eighties without decoration. It is a useful marker of how far the permitted limit had widened. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1983. It was among the most watched films in the Soviet Union that year, with admissions above thirty five million. The scenes between Gurchenko and Basilashvili carry everything. Neither of them raises their voice or explains anything. Who it is for: viewers who like Soviet cinema and two hander stories confined to one place. Who it is not for: the pace is slow and the first half hour is almost entirely argument. It asks for patience.