The Beginning

About a girl who works in a factory, spends her spare time acting in a local drama group, and is discovered by a film director looking for an unknown to play Joan of Arc in his next movie, The Beginning avoids all the clichés you'd expect from a plot like this, souping the whole thing up by interweaving segments from the 'Joan' film with sequences around the girl's life. This is Panfilov's second film, and he has obviously absorbed his fair share of Bergman, Bresson, Forman and Godard, but generally without allowing their influence to get in the way. The film also says something about the manufacturing of stereotypes. At the end the girl is unemployed, doing the agency rounds before going back to where she came from, while the camera lingers on an impossibly glamorous poster of her outside a cinema.