Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears is probably the worst choice for a film title that I have come across recently. It conjures up images of Russia hunkering down to resist the invasion of Napoleon’s army or Hilter’s panzer divisions. Every Russian language film I’ve seen prior to this one has dealt with topics that were either dead serious or classics of literature. It never crossed my mind from the title that this was going to be essentially a romantic comedy. A sort of Meg Ryan-ovich vehicle or a kind of Sex and the City-ovich. Except for location and cultural milieu, this is the most Hollywood-like foreign film that I’ve seen in a long time. It also stands up pretty well for a film made in 1979.

The Story: Three young Russian provincial women live together in a women’s dormitory for factory workers in Moscow. They are Katerina (or Katya) (Vera Alentova), Lyudmila (Irina Muravyova), and Antonina (Raisa Ryazanova). They are best friends but each distinctive in her own way. Katerina is ambitious, hoping to pass the entrance exam for the university. In her most recent effort, she missed the cutoff by just two points. Lyudmila is ambitious in another sort of way. She views Moscow as one great big lottery where her chances of landing a rich (or, at least, upwardly mobile) husband seem pretty good. She’s not above helping the process along by any means at her disposal. Antonina already has a guy on the string, Nikolai (Boris Smorchkov), and it's turning serious. He has asked her to come home with him to meet his parents. Antonina is somewhat terrified by that prospect but is convinced to agree when Nicolai suggests that her two friends can come along as well. Antonina needn’t have worried, however, as it turns out that she is a big hit with Nikolai’s parents.

Men are scarce in Moscow and in a highly class-conscious society, Lyudmila judges her status as a lowly factory worker a major drawback for hooking a talented man. She practices a variety of deceits that advance the impression that she is better situated than she actually is. She insists, for example, that the dormitory headmistress not answer the telephone with the greeting, “Dormitory.” She leads her callers to believe that she lives with her parents. She spends time at the university library pretending to be a student so as to come into contact with eligible degree candidates.

Katerina is asked by a relative to house-sit a classy apartment for a few days, which immediately triggers a massive brainstorm for Lyudmila. They will throw a reception – a dinner party – at the apartment, pretending that they are daughters of a professor and that the apartment is theirs, and invite a half-dozen or so eligible men. Among the guests are a poet, a deputy chairman of the board, a science candidate, a hockey player, and a television cameraman. In the end, Katerina goes for the cameraman, Rachkov (Yuri Vasilyev) and Lyudmila for the hockey player, Gurin (Aleksandr Fatyushin). Later, Katerina discovers that she is pregnant just about the same time that Antonina is marrying Nikolai. Before Katerina even has a chance to tell Rachkov that she is pregnant, Rachkov shows up on assignment at the factory where Katerina works at a press. Katerina has been selected to be interviewed, so her ruse about being a professor’s daughter is thoroughly exposed. Rachkov dumps her hard and is unrelenting even when he later learns of her pregnancy. He sends his snooty mother to visit Katerina to “settle” the matter with the offer of a monetary pittance – which Katya refuses.

The film now fast forwards twenty years to 1978. The three female protagonists are still close friends, but life has changed dramatically for all. Antonina and Nikolai are still happily married but now have three sons. Lyudmila had married her hockey player, Gurin, but he had become an alcoholic and they had divorced seven years ago. They had no children. Katerina has not only raised a lovely daughter, Alexandra (Natalya Vavilova), but has completed a degree in engineering and risen to the position of plant manager. She has been less successful romantically, however, having to make do with a demeaning affair with a married man.

By a chance encounter on a train, Katya meets an interesting and attractive man named Gosha (Aleksei Batalov). He takes an immediate interest in her and courts her handsomely. When she finds him waiting for her near her home, she invites him to meet her daughter and stay for dinner. After assuring himself that there is not also a husband to be met, Gosha sets about making dinner for Katya, eliciting Alexandra’s willing help in the process. During dinner, Gosha boldly announces that he hopes that he and Katya will soon be married. He invites Katya and Alexandra to join him and his friends for a picnic that Sunday. During the picnic, Gosha’s friends pull a ruse of their own. They pretend its Gosha’s birthday as an excuse to heap lavish praise on him – for the benefit of the woman he hopes to impress. Katya is duly impressed. It is obvious that Gosha is well-liked and highly-respected by his companions.

In several respects, Gosha seems to Katya almost too good to be true. He is fun to be with, contented with his situation in life (he is a very capable tool-and-die man – not a college-educated professional, but a skilled blue-collar kind of job), he takes an interest in connecting with Alexandra, and helps out around the house. They seem to be hitting it off in bed as well. There is just one problem. Gosha’s views in relation to gender roles are pretty traditional and a bit chauvinistic – not surprising, really, given his working class roots. He’s not especially oppressively chauvinistic, but he does openly indicate that he believes that a man must be the head-of-the-household and that he could never marry a woman who made more than himself. He has no idea that Katya is, in fact, just such a woman. Now Katya, who earlier deceived Alexandra’s biological father by exaggerating her social status, must deceive Gosha by understating her professional position, or she will surely lose him. Katya, as a plant manager, is also used to bossing both men and women around, which is clearly not something that Gosha will be able to tolerate from a wife. This conflict in role expectations comes to a head when Gosha and Nikolai rescue Alexandra’s boyfriend from a beating at the hands of an ex-boyfriend of Alexandra and a bunch of his thug associates. Whether and how Katya and Gosha resolve their conflict I’ll leave for readers to discover, but suffice it to say, the entire issue provides ample food for thought.

Themes: This film inherently raises a couple of interesting issues: (1) the difficulty of finding a good spouse, especially after age twenty-five or so; and (2) gender relationships and chauvinism. Moscow Doesn’t Believe In Tears would make a great group-viewing piece for stimulating discussion in a high school or college classroom about gender relationships. To take the first issue first, people who match up relatively early in life seldom comprehend how difficult it is to play the dating game after one gets out of college or, if one doesn’t attend college, the corresponding years of life. College is a great place to meet a large number of eligible partners, to “try them on”, so to speak, through dating, and to shop around until one finds a suitable match. If one remains single until later in life or if one divorces or is widowed, most will find it much tougher to meet any sizable number of prospects. We go to the same place of employment each day, the same residence, and pretty much the same stores and places of amusement. Pretty soon, one has met all of the other people one is likely to meet at those sites and precious few are single, reasonably close to the right age, or otherwise suitable as a partner. The more eccentric or fussy one is as an individual, the greater the problem becomes. For those older than twenty-five or so, pick-up bars are about the only remaining kind of establishment specifically catering to people meeting. What if one is not into consuming alcohol or frequenting bars? Moreover, bars outside of metropolitan areas have a pretty limited clientele.

Although the problem of finding a suitable match is universal to some extent, it also differs significantly in kind and degree from one time and place to another. In India and some other Asian and Arab cultures, it is less of a problem because marriages are frequently arranged by parents. In Western countries, where arranged marriages are out of fashion, there are a whole slew of circumstances that can exacerbate the usual problems in finding a match. Sometimes, (as in Moscow in all recent decades), a huge differential develops in the number of marriageable men vs. women. Russian women often emigrate from Russian into arranged marriages in America, Britain, or elsewhere precisely for that reason. (See the Nicole Kidman film Birthday Girl for a humorous twist on the theme of the Russian mail-order bride.) Worse, some even get lured into enforced prostitution – in Israel and elsewhere – under the pretext of a marriage opportunity. American readers may be better able to understand the issue by relating it to the situation that currently exists for black women in America. Since I’m neither black nor a woman, I may be pushing my luck in raising the issue, but I’ve read some on this topic as well as watching a talk show or two about it. Black women in America today, taken collectively, are having a lot of difficulty finding suitable marriage partners. (Try the movie Save the Last Dance For Me as one example of a film touching on this issue.) I’ve read that one out of every ten black men is either killed or incarcerated by age twenty-one. Moreover, for whatever reason, black women are integrating more successfully into mainstream American culture than are black men. Why is an arguable point, but the statistics don’t lie. There are many more successful professional black women than black men. Then, in addition, more black men pair up with white woman than vice versa. Again, I won’t speculate as to why, but the statistics are clear. Many times it is the most “eligible” black men who choose white wives. For all of those reasons, many upwardly mobile black women find themselves reduced to one of two options: remain single or marry a man of lesser education and/or earning capacity. For those who prefer the second option, there are often challenges relating to the psychodynamics of the relationship that the couple has to confront.

It is all well and good for feminists to ask, “Why should a woman have to pamper her man’s ego, simply because she is more able in some sense or better educated?” Well, one answer is that, regardless of gender, in any marriage where husband and wife (or even same sex partners) come from unequal social backgrounds or have major differences in earning capacity, a thoughtful spouse recognizes the potential for such differences to become a source of friction and is careful not to aggravate such potential problems by giving undue importance to the differences that exist. Then, secondly, most western societies still inculcate their boys and young men into the notion that to be a real man, you have to be assertive, competent, in-charge (at least some of the time), and an effective breadwinner. Some men will find it emasculating to be the lesser bread-winner of their family. I’m prepared to side with feminists to the extent of saying that men have to learn to deal with such feelings – so long as a wife is not also compounding the problem by assuming a dominant (note I did not say equal) stance in the family. Many men who are already the lesser breadwinner are not going to be able to tolerate also being bossed around.

I have read a couple of dozen comments and reviews about this film, mostly by female viewers. Any number have complained that Gosha is a sexist pig or blatantly macho kind of guy. Not a single viewer comments negatively on anything about Katya’s behavior toward Gosha. Consider, then, this statement by Katya at the dinner table, commenting on the incident where Gosha and Nikolai go to the rescue of Alexandra’s boyfriend: “You shouldn’t have done that. Using your fists is no way to settle problems. Use words. Sometimes they hurt even more.” [Well, on one level, she is merely stating her opinion, but note that the ideas that problems can be solved by conversation and that verbal aggression is acceptable but physical aggression is not are distinctly the views of the educated bourgeoisie and not the working class. Katya is implicitly distinguishing herself from Gosha’s working class viewpoint.] She continues, “And a grown-up man like you should’ve known better. Now those boys will think that might makes right.” [She is scolding him as a mother scolds a son, not speaking to him as one equal to another.] The ultimate offense, however, comes in the next line: “Kindly promise me that in the future you’ll never do anything like this without my permission.” [Who is Katya to demand that Gosha seek her permission to do what he believes to be right?] I’ll probably incur the wrath of the feminists among you, but unfortunately, Katya, in this scene, is actually reinforcing and justifying Gosha’s concern about being married to a woman of higher status than himself. She has, indeed, assumed a posture of having the right to tell him what to do, presumably because of her superior education and position in society. Gosha’s need to be the “head-of-the-household” is indeed unreasonable and sexist, but Katya’s de facto assumption of the prerogative of overseeing his activities is unreasonable, insensitive, and classist. She bosses workers around all day long and needs to be careful not to continue in that mode at home.

Gosha is not the ideal man – but, he is a good deal closer to it than a whole lot of other men. His principal flaw is that he was brought up to believe that a man must be the head-of-his-household – a chauvinist viewpoint that is a relic of many centuries of gender socialization. On the other hand, he shares household work (he enjoys cooking), he has taken a genuine interest in Katya’s daughter (even to the point of endangering himself to protect her boyfriend), he is fun to be with (both for Katya and Alexandra), he is loyal to his friends and respected and loved by them in return, and he is sensitive and romantic. And he’s the first quality guy that has come along in twenty years into Katya’s life. Frankly, I have to say that it’s a blatant excess of feminist philosophy to suggest that she should reject this man simply because his insecure male-ego needs a little stroking now and then. Given the inferiority of his education and earning capacity, it is no more than basic consideration for Katya to bolster his self-esteem in small ways. That doesn’t mean that she ought to assume a subordinate position in any significant way. Equality runs both ways and there is as much risk in this relationship of Katya excessively dominating Gosha as the other way around.

The women who comment on this film also take little notice of the deceits perpetrated by the female characters in order to “secure a man” except that several reviewers do acknowledge that Lyudmilla is something of a blatant gold-digger. I think, however, that the more important character is Katya and that it is her exercises in deceit that form the core of the film. She knows better, but allows herself to be talked into misrepresenting her status in life to the men invited to their reception at the home of Katya’s relative. This deception leads ultimately to her affair with Rachkov, her pregnancy, and (when Rachkov discovers that she is merely a factory worker), Rachkov’s abandonment of her. Later, when she has achieved success that greatly exceeds what she earlier falsely claimed, she feels that she must now deceive Gosha by understating her professional position. The message that feminists likely derive from this is: “Isn’t it terrible that women have to lie about their social status in order to appease the egos of men?” The fairer statement of the issue, however, is that it is both unethical and unwise to attempt to secure a mate with false pretenses, secrets, and lies. It’s bound to end in misery.

Production Values: Director Vladimir Menshov has provided a tautly constructed film. Though longish, it doesn’t drag or leave one with the feeling of unnecessary frames. The portrayals are all excellent. Vera Alentova is the standout, providing an appealing performance both as the young Katya and the more accomplished one at age forty. She carries the film, although Irina Muravyova, as the less scrupulous Lyudmila, gives her a run for her money, especially in the first half of the film. I also especially enjoyed Aleksei Batalov as Gosha and Natalya Vavilova as Alexandra. The lesser characters were very effectively delivered as well.

Overall, this film strikes me as neither significantly better nor significantly worse than any of a number of Hollywood romantic comedies, such as You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, or Sleepless in Seattle. The major difference between Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears and the better Meg Ryan vehicles is the very Russian flavor of the former. You learn a lot about ordinary life in Moscow, customs, and attitudes, but, of course, the price you pay for that nice element is reading subtitles.

Bottom-Line: Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears beat out some pretty good competition to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1980. While not one of the top winners over the years of this award, the film is also no embarrassment to the Academy. It is enjoyable while raising significant issues about gender relationships and finding love matches in the adult world. Some may dislike what they believe to be the film’s message in relation to gender relationships (some even call it anti-feminist), but the film doesn’t really take any such stand. It simply illuminates the issue in a fairly realistic and balanced way. Some viewers would apparently prefer that it take a stand more aligned with their own.

Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears is in Russian with English subtitles. There is apparently a two-disk version with a variety of features. My copy consists of a single DVD without extras. The running time is 150 minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Russia and the U.S.S.R.:

Alexander Nevsky
Andrei Rublev
Anna Karenina
Ballad of a Soldier
Burnt By the Sun
Come and See
The Cranes Are Flying
Dersu Uzala
Don Quixote
Freeze Die
Ivan the Terrible
Nostalghia
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
Solaris
Strike
War and Peace

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older