Bortko: Blonde around the Corner (1984)
Блондинка за углом (The Blonde аround the Corner). Directed by Vladimir Bortko. With Andrei Mironov (Nikolai Poryvaev), Tatyana Dogileva (Nadya), and Evgenia Khanaeva (Regina). Lenfilm, 1984.
Description: Nikolai Poryvaev, a former astrophysicist demoted to working as a loader at a Moscow supermarket, marries Nadya, the saleswoman of the vegetable department. The wedding banquet brings these two worlds into one room: his old intelligentsia friends, whose cultural standing no longer commands material respect, and her circle of trade workers, who control access to deficit goods such as railway tickets, apartment repairs, Black Sea vacations, theater tickets, rare books, the sexologist. The official Soviet hierarchy of status had been inverted.