Change of Fortune

Maria has a fit of rage and fires six shots at the lover who deceived her. She ends up in prison. The plot of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter served as guideline for this little tragedy.
After the romantic, noble Soviet woman, Muratova now turns to the ‘wild white woman’. With her eruptions, determination, tenderness, composure and fears, she is a woman par excellence. The well-bred lady harbouring diabolical passions. The desire to create an unimaginably exotic setting for the action.
Muratova doesn’t romanticize her heroine, a horrifying and magnificent flower of evil. She analyses the shadow side of the perfect form (of a woman, of things, of concepts). What’s most important here is the infernal power of the unusual actress Natalya Leble. Uncompromising in her role, coquettish and weak, and dangerous as a pent-up force of nature.
‘It’s impossible to alter your fate,’ the director says, ‘One prison will change the other… Maria…becomes a prisoner in her own prison, the prison of her daydreaming.’

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