Best Of Times (tbc)
- Run time: 1 hour 33 mins
- Language: Russian
- Genre: Drama
- Release date: 1st January 2007
- Starring: Mikhail Evlanov, Dana Agisheva, Irina Evdokimova
- Directed by: Svetlana Proskurina
- Distributor: Gorki film studios and KinoProba
Plot Synopsis
The narrative in Svetlana Proskurina's latest film is deceptively simple. Two middle-aged women, Katia and Valia, are looking back on a distant youth in which, together with a man called Valentin, they formed a tragic love triangle. Valentin's true love is Valia, but after a separation caused by Valentin's imprisonment for the maiming of a violent neighbour in the communal apartment they all share, Valentin begins a relationship with Katia who has been jealous of Valia all along. He marries Katia, but years later his path crosses again with that of Valia, for whom his love is rekindled with new passion. Unable to leave Katia, and apparently abandoned by Valia, he eventually kills himself whilst engaging in a desperate, solitary variant of Russian roulette with a rifle, in which one of only two compartments is loaded. Valia returns to his home only to find Katia mourning her dead husband. The two women then become imprisoned in a relationship based on mutual hatred, but tinged with a bizarre affinity attributable to their shared grief.
'A tiled swimming pool and a Southern sea. Opera arias and an unskilful accordion, passionate whispers and despairing letters. The inexplicable metaphysics of love. A guy and two girls, a man and two women. With and without him... It is not a love triangle, but an insatiable desire to live their own story until the end, no matter what the end might be.' (from the script by Ivan Vyrypaev).