Intrigue

Based on the Russian classic novel. While maintaining all the main plot-lines of the novel, it follows the events not as they happen but as they are reflected in the mind of the dying hero. Thus make a chain of recollections about the life he had lived through, now seen as a series of irrevocable mistakes and interpreted anew: it is either reconsideration or repentance. Recollections make main hero torment himself over his own past pretenses that seem ridicules now agonize and despair over his perfect indifference to everything except himself, see the horrible aspect of killing his friend, a greenhorn and a show-off. The final action of an intelligent and outstanding man is judging oneself without mercy.—Anonymous

Classical literature is sacred! - insist some. Classical literature is the living substance of the arts and it revives each time the contemporary audience discerns in it its own image, getting aware of itself argue others. Film Pechorin, which was made after Lermontovs short novel A Hero of Our Time that had already been cinematized several times before, violates the rule that states: classical literature is sacred. From a single reply of the hero to Maxim Maximych enquiry I am off to Persia and hope to drop dead somewhere on the road there springs up a whole new plot-line. The words come true, and we have Pechorin dying on the road, alone and face to face with his remembrances in the eternal and mysterious expanses of the desert. Here everything that had happened to him manifests itself as permeated with the mood of premature weariness and boredom he was blighted with, in the discourses on his unrealized great destiny he never guessed and the meaning of his life he never discovered, with his habitual indifference to his surroundings, with seeking eagerly for entertainments and news to fill up the days and the minutes of his life, with his relationships with women that alone gave him chances to awaken his heart and soul. It is precisely on this very edge of earthly existence that he experiences at last this sort of a repentance, that defines the composition and style of this film version, thus allowing certain freedom in treatment of the source: the episodes of the novel are sometimes considerably reduced, like it is done with the Bela plot-line, compressed into a single scene, or serve as the leading motif of the heros conversations about meaning of life with doctor Werner, his alter-ego, in his hand-to-hand combat with the star female character of Taman part of the novel, in the events and dramatic development of his relationships with Mary, in excruciating encounters with Maksim Maksimych, in his spiritual but never realized union with Vera. To judge oneself with the severest of judgments, to suffer pain and despair, to laugh broken-heartedly at ones own past pretensions, sometimes almost childish, sometimes quite consciously cracked wicked jokes and fooling around, to be stricken by horror with the killing at a duel of young and showing off Grushnitsky, now seen as irrevocable mistakes committed by an intelligent and an outstanding man such is the final summary of Pechorins life. It was neither coherent and literal transferring Lermontovs text to screen, nor creating a digest for schoolchildren to save them the trouble of reading the novel, that the author of the film set as his goal. He sees his task in compressing together different epochs, demonstrating to the contemporary audience the essence of dramatic problems that repeat themselves over and over again throughout the history, in inviting people to look into their own souls and think about their own lives. That is why the final glance from the past the extreme close-up of Pechorins eyes looking at us, seems to demand from every and each of us to answer for ones one and only life, that one either has had or is having.