Peremena uchasti

Maria is married and shoots her lover dead out of jealousy. She ends up in prison; her lawyer and her husband try to prove that she acted out of self-defense. Yet she proves to be a liar whose behavior is deliberately “immoral”, her contradictory character traits making her a colorful character unable to escape her fate. Kira Muratova transposes the literary source material by Somerset Maugham (The Letter) from Singapore to Central Asia. She shines a light on the racism of the Russians who live there (the monologue spoken by one of the prisoners states that “only a white woman is a woman”); the juxtaposition of the locals and the colonizers culminates in a scene that drifts towards surrealism and dream. (al)