You Are My Only Love

A girl tells her uncle Evgeny that 'I'll love you all my life', as she leaves Leningrad for New York, only to return years later, now an important sales executive, to work on a Russo-American project, involving the engineering company where hard-pressed Evgeny is now employed. Astrakhan's sour comedy uses this relationship as a springboard for analysing the post-communist malaise, with everyone jumping to the Yankee dollar. The flashback sequences to the Beatles-dominated '70s will please retro fans who like three-quarter length plastic macs, but they may be less impressed by the movie's enervated old-fashioned neo-realist feel. Here's an instance of a director finding a subject before he's found a style.