Miss Moscow Pageant (1989)
Description: We Want Change
The Miss Moscow Beauty Pageant, the first in many decades. Contestants walk the stage and dance; the jury; Masha Kalinina, eventual winner, amongst the contestants. Correspondents photograph and film the contest. Artist Ilya Glazunov among the audience.
Valentin Pichul: Little Vera (1988)
Description: Our heroine Vera, who longs to be an honest woman but finds only unhappiness among the adults around her, contemplates her future as a wife with her intended, a young man unacceptable to her parents and unwilling to treat them with respect.
Petr Todorovskii: Intergirl (1987)
Description: Todorovskii’s film, based on a popular novel by Vladimir Kunin, revealed the lurid world of foreign currency prostitution to Soviet viewers. The heroine Tanya wants desperately to gain the comfortable life of a housewife beyond the reach of Soviet women, and marries a Swedish client who falls in love with her. In this scene her husband-to-be, coached in the values of Russian culture by his fiancee, makes a good impression on his future mother-in-law. Yet all the film’s ambivalence about the sullying of Russian womanhood by Soviet reality, comes out when the Swede calculates the check that he receives in Leningrad’s fancy European Hotel, an act that even the waiter recognizes to be vulgar. Our heroine is also embarrassed when she is spotted by another client in the restaurant.