Dolgie provody

Yevgenia is a single mother. Her teenage son Sasha tries to extract himself from her maternal care by suggesting he move to live with his father in Novosibirsk, which hurts Yevgenia’s feelings and plunges her into an existential crisis. In scenes from everyday life, Muratova evokes a woman’s entire emotional cosmos, her longings, vulnerability and contradictions. Narrated in fragmentary fashion with a collage-like montage whereby sound and image often diverge, a touching, multifaceted psychological study of a mother-son relationship and its imminent dissolution gradually comes into focus. THE LONG FAREWELL was only allowed to be publicly screened at the end of the 80s, but was apparently shown to generations of VGIK students before that as an example of a cinematic masterpiece. (al)