Relations

Avdotya Smirnova is a celebrated scriptwriter and has collaborated with Alexei Uchitel (The Stroll) for many years. She is the daughter of one of the leading Russian film directors of the 70s, Andrei Smirnov (see Autumn). Smirnova originally wrote this film for Alexei Uchitel to direct, but she became the director and Uchitel the producer.
Relations is a melodrama portraying the long-distance love affair between Ilya (Mikhail Porechenkov), a Moscow nouveau riche businessman and Nina (a memorable performance by Anna Mikhalkova, also starring in Playing the Victim), a Petersburg advertising agent. They are both happily married with children, loving families and all strings attached.
Smirnova’s elegant, witty, intimate and unsophisticated love story is the first of its kind in the post-Soviet cinema decade. The preoccupation with action, criminal drama, fantasy and other commercially successful genres has driven romance from Russian screens, both in popular and in art-house productions. Relations borrows and quotes from many classical films of the genre, including Un homme et une femme by Claude Lelouch and her father’s Autumn, a Soviet romantic hit banned by the censors. Smirnova tackles the universal theme of impossible adult love with great psychological depth, artistic compassion and wisdom. The moral of the story, as the director herself puts it, is that ‘great love coming into the life of a mature adult is always a disaster’. (LC)