Dear Elena Sergeevna
Dear Elena Sergeevna (Mosfilm, 1988)
Eldar Riazanov's film, starring Marina Neeolova as the teacher and Fedor Dunaevsky, Dmitry Marianov, and Andrei Tikhomirnov as three of her students, is based on a play written by Liudmila Razumovskaia in 1981 but suppressed until glasnost made it producible. Four graduating seniors arrive at their mathematics teacher's apartment on her birthday bearing flowers — and a demand that she hand over the key to the safe containing their exam papers. What begins as moral blackmail escalates into something far uglier, as the students, products of a system whose ideals they have entirely ceased to believe in, test how far she will bend before breaking.