Adapted for the screen from Vladimir Gurkin’s own stage
theater play of the same name, Love and Pigeons zeroes in on forestry
worker Vasily (Alexander Mikhailov) who lives in the countryside with his wife
Nadezhda (Nina Doroshina) and their three children.Cantankerous over her husband’s frivolous
spending on pigeon raising which she rebukes him for every time, the family
also contends with their next-door neighbors who are endlessly bickering and
their drunken Uncle Mitya (Sergey Yursky).After Vasily sustains a work related injury he is sent off to a seaside
resort for treatment where he meets Raisa Zakharovna (Lyudmila Gurchenko) who
works for the same forestry company.It
doesn’t take long for one thing to lead to another and for the confused
lovesick Vasily and flighty go-getter Raisa to engage in an extramarital affair
which causes all manner of upheaval and conflict between Vasily, Raisa and beleaguered
wife Nadezhda who is not prepared to let her husband go without a major fight. Based on playwright Vladimir Gurkin’s own life experiences
involving real figures who lived in the homeland near him which Menshov caught
by accident in passing, the film is a generational romcom about an ordinary
everyman caught between two vastly different worlds despite being tied to the
same employer.Unlike the director’s
previous masterpiece Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears however, Love
and Pigeons isn’t afraid to delve into fantastical imaginings including but
not limited to a dream sequence that almost drowned its hapless leading male
star Alexander Mikhailov.In one
sequence a magician was even hired to perform trickery in real time for the
camera and in another use of optical superimpositions a starfield forms
lettering sending a warning to the film’s idiot hero, making it something of a
hallucinatory and at times visually striking romcom. Lensed handsomely with lush bright green vistas of the
countryside by Yuriy Nevskiy who worked as a camera operator on Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Solaris and aided by a subtly romantic orchestral score by Through
Fire, Water and…Brass Pipes composer Valentin Levashov with two original
song contributions from legendary children’s author Eduard Uspensky, Love
and Doves is like a handmade homemade Russian Hallmark card.Contrasting the differences between the rural
and brick-and-mortar cityside lifestyles beautifully through the sound and
visuals, Love and Pigeons unfolds ornately while feeling like a slice of
life anecdote you’d hear shared between housewives who aren’t ready to let
their husbands be whisked away into the bacchanal of city life.
The ones who really make this tensely funny love triangle
come together are the three leads Alexander Mikhailov as the husband Vasily,
Lyudmila Gurchenko as the preppy city woman/illicit lover Raisa and particularly
Nina Doroshina’s fiery, fiercely impassioned performance as Nadezhda who brings
down Hellfire and Brimstone upon finding out about her husband’s infidelities.So intense and controlled energetically is
this woman’s performance just watching her onscreen makes you feel like she’s
going to leap through it and attack you.Even when she doesn’t give her schmuck husband an easy way back against the
wishes of her children, you kind of get an impish delightful chuckle out of how
hard she doles it back to Vasily for his cheatings. While not amassing nearly the same success as Moscow Does
Not Believe in Tears at the Soviet box office, Love and Pigeons became
a major hit in its own right whose legacy still lives on to this day.For instance in 2011 the two main characters
Vasily and Nadezhda had commemorative sculptures made in Cheremkhov by artist
Karim Mukhamadeev and in 2018 one of the houses where the film was shot was
restored to mark the film’s anniversary.Despite never being formally released in America, the film did win the
Golden Rook Award at the 1985 Torremolinos International Comedy Festival and
years later in 2009 was nominated Best Soviet Film by the MTV Russia Movie
Awards.
Seen now, it is a quintessential Russian romcom that takes
its place alongside such Soviet fare as The Girls or The Irony of
Fate, a film that deals in screwball comedy that is also indicative of the
distinctly Russian penchant for adorable movies about the depths of love amid
laughs. Though Vladimir Menshov only
went on to direct four more features, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears and
Love and Pigeons nevertheless signify him as one of the premier Russian
Artists of his day and this picture as maybe his funniest film.
