Every now and then one views a film which seems to stay in one's mind, a film of which one cannot let go, and painfully one is forced to wonder and guess and think--what was it that touched me so deeply? The plot of "Adam's Rib" (by excellent author Vladimir Kunin), is simple. A middle-aged woman, her paralyzed mother, and her two daughters from different husbands live together, in a tiny two-room (note, two rooms, not two bedrooms), apartment in Moscow, during the very last days of the dying Soviet Empire. Both her daughters work, and so does she, as a tour-guide in the Borodino Museum. Simply an aging, beautiful, intelligent woman working monstrously hard to make ends meet. Her eldest daughter works in an office, and is in love with her manager. Her youngest is a grocery-store clerk, exploring her fifteen year-old body with a young plebeian man, who works as a security guard. A simple, hard, and monotonous existence shared by four women, and three incredibly different generations in a tiny, dark apartment. And then, suddenly, in the midst of this deadly dull and monotonous life, Ninna Elizarovna meets a man who falls in love with her, and life grows enormously more complicated. I will say nothing more, so as not to spoil the plot for the viewer, but the qualities of this film are unmistakable. The spectacular acting ability of the main heroine, played by Inna Churikova, the talented camera-work which brings into sharp focus the uncertain, dangerous, and occasionally, startlingly beautiful life in a country which brought itself to the brink of an abyss, the shadowy terror and sorrow cast by the flashback memories that the Grandmother sees of her terrible, decades-old crime, the intelligent dialogue and sharply questioning scenario--all of this combines into a magnificent work.
