My review was written in December 1982 after a Greenwich Village screening.
Septuagenarian director Josef Heiftz, known for his Chekhov adaptations, such as "The Lady with the Dog" (1960) and "The Duel" (1974), turns to a story by Ivan Turgenev for "Asya", a gentle romance. Arriving Stateside sans the fanfare accorded other recent Soviet releases, this modest film is nonetheless a well-crafted entertainment, likely to do okay in markets receptive to Russian period films.
Told in the form of a recollection (actually, a lamen), "Asya" concerns a Russian gentleman of the 19th century traveling in Germany who becomes fascinated with a free-spirited Russian girl he meets there, Asya (Elena Koreneva). Traveling with her brother, an artist named Gagin, her real name is Anna, and the hero, doubting that the duo are really brother and sister, discovers she is actually Gagin's half-sister, daughter of the family maid.
Becoming good friends with the pair (in an ambiguous trio reminiscent of Terrence Malick's central conceit of "Days of Heaven"), the traveler is obviously falling in love with Asa, but is too inhibited to follow through and marry her. One morning they are gone, and though he pursues by steamboat to Cologne, he soon gives up the quest and returns homesick to Russia. Picture's final segment has him many years later visiting Germany again, but so consumed by self-pity that when he spies a double for Asya on a passing train he barely reacts, certain that she is too young to be the genuine girl.
Shot extensively on East German locations in lovely, muted colors by cameraman Heinrich Marandjian, "Asya" benefits from good thesping by Igor Kostolevskya as the inhibited hero and the diminutive Elena Koreneva (resembling a teenaged Shirley MacLaine) as Asya. Supporting cast's German dialog is translated into Russian in voice-over, with the whole package English-subtitled.
