I’ve not seen too many Russian films in my day, although from what I’ve heard about a number of the more famous ones, they are generally regarded to be obscure and often lengthy affairs. The Russian film version of War and Peace is apparently eight or nine hours long. Films like Solaris and Andrei Rublev are very slow, arty, and long. (I’ve never seen any of these films, although the idea that they are slow, arty, and long doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll continue to avoid them)

Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1980) is also very long -- about two and a half hours. But it is definitely not arty or slow. In fact, it’s the Russian version of a soap opera -- anyone who enjoys soap operas, or has watched a Douglas Sirk movie in their day, will probably get something out of this, although this Russian film is more low-key and low-budget -- and has subtitles, of course.

Three young woman are friends, while living in a women’s dormitory in Moscow in the late 1950’s. They are in Moscow for their studies, and in hopes of finding a better life in the city than what they would expect to get back in the country. One woman soon gets married pretty quickly, but the other two women have fairly turbulent love lives.

One of the young women is to housesit her aunt and uncle’s apartment, and the more tempestuous other friend hits on this notion that they should throw a party and invite all the men she has met over the past while. She has met all of these respectable older, and professional, gentlemen, from scientists and writers, to a hockey player, and passes herself off as a student in psychology, when in actual fact, she works at a bakery. She gets to convince her friend to pass herself off as a student in an equally admirable profession (even though she is a low-wage drone at a factory where they make nuts and bolts and the like).

The women have their party. Soon they find themselves paired off. One woman gets the hockey player, while the other gets a television cameraman. The big issue is how to break it to these guys that the women aren’t who they say they are..... the hockey player accepts it very quickly (he no longer will feel inferior to her), but the cameraman only finds out when he films at the woman’s workplace. This relationship breaks off very fast, as she gets pregnant by him, and the man shows himself to be a big jerk, blaming her for the whole thing. He leaves her, and won’t be seen again until the end of the movie, when 20 years have passed.

As with a Douglas Sirk movie, Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears manages to be both melodramatic and somewhat realistic. Of course, the twists and turns of the plot are to keep us hooked, and the movie can occasionally be silly, but the issues involved are much like the much-maligned “women’s pictures” of Sirk and others. The different fates of the three women are a cross-section of what women may possibly go through. The woman who gets married early on stays married for the rest of the picture, and seems to be a relatively happy housewife. The woman who marries the hockey player seems to have finally found her true romance -- until it, tragic-comically, goes sour (you’ll understand what I mean when you watch the film). The third woman completely absorbs herself into a professional life as an executive for the engineering company she worked for when she was younger, while raising her daughter -- she’s the most successful, but does this mean that she is the most happy?

The second half of the film, which is set in the present (as in 1979-80) day, deals mainly with this professional woman, and a new romance that she enters with a tool and die maker. This seems like a mismatch, naturally -- professional woman and blue-collar man. In every way, this seems like a mismatch -- the professional woman has views about male/female relationships that are completely different from that of this working man, who believes that men should make more than women, and that men are, naturally, heads of the household. Nevertheless, there is something about this guy that the woman goes for.... perhaps it’s because he does come across, to her, at least, as a strong individual. This doesn’t mean that this particular relationship doesn’t have problems, because it does, and near the end, you wonder if things will actually turn out well.

It took a while for me to get into this movie, but after about thirty minutes, it became quite enjoyable -- certain soap opera plots appeal to me, and, just as with Imitation of Life, the Sirk picture, this movie’s strength is in depicting a lifelong friendship between women who go through their own unique romantic experiences. As with other movies of this type, the women are the main focus, while the men are secondary characters, but that’s only to be expected. The female characters are quite distinctive, although there’s a flaw in that the woman who remains married for the entire film isn’t given as much screen time as the other two. The male characters are also interesting, although the tool and die man is something else -- he’s such a gloomy person. I don’t think he even smiles once during the duration of his role.

Of course, being a Russian film, many of the subjects, and the locales, are more unique to the Communist ideals of the time, which means that nobody is as rich and glamourous as they are in Hollywood. The film is also quite low-budget, which means that the visuals are nothing fancy either, although it does contain one neat shot in which the professional woman goes to bed, setting her alarm clock, before crying herself to sleep. When the alarm clock rings the next morning, nearly twenty years have passed.

So, overall, if you don’t mind subtitles, or the idea of watching a Russian movie made when Communism was still the status quo, Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears is a nice example of soapy melodrama, proving that not all foreign films are weird and artsy.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day