Author Topic: RAILWAY STATION FOR TWO (1982)  (Read 161 times)

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Offline agate

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RAILWAY STATION FOR TWO (1982)
« on: May 11, 2017, 10:23:20 am »
 This movie was made in the USSR, and the characters call one another "comrade."  As used here, the word seems to be used more as "pal" or "dude" than as having  political overtones.

The story is not just clothed in romanticism--it is swaddled in layers and layers of it. At times it becomes almost too gooey to stand much more of. But it has some surprises too.

Vera, a waitress at a railway station restaurant, gets involved with Platon, a passenger who happens into her life because he tries to eat at the restaurant.  Vera already has a boy friend, Andrei, and Platon we know to be married. But they fall in love, to put it mildly.

The surprising part comes when Andrei and Platon have a confrontation and a fight ensues.  While tables and crockery are being smashed at the restaurant, Andrei gets the better of Platon every time. In many movies the winner in physical combat walks off with the prize, but here Vera still has no use for Andrei and stays with Platon, even though he has just been humiliated.

I may be misinterpreting this story, but the entire railway station segment of the movie--which is 90 percent of it--is probably a figment of Platon's imagination.  At the outset he is seen as a prisoner who is sent on leave to see his wife--and to pick up an accordion.  He doesn't want to see his wife but the circumstances are such that he is going to have to make the trip. From then on, the story doesn't make much sense unless it's his fantasy.

It can also work on a real level though. There is Platon's hair. When he is first seen he is wearing a prison haircut, probably identifiable to all Russians as a prison haircut (I'm guessing here). When he is Platon on the trip, he has longer hair. One has to wonder if the prison supplied him with a wig, and if so, why.  Nothing is said about it.

Towards the end, when he has presumably finally reached his wife's house, entered and found nobody home but an elegant meal set out, he has the prison hair. Enter Vera, quite unexpectedly (we can assume she found her way there because she has already talked about how she called the wife), and she seems to have figured out--from the hair change?--that he is a prisoner, not the man about to go to trial he has told her he is.

This interesting story has some hammy segments, and I could have done without some of the music fragments woven into it, but the acting seems excellent, and we learn about a couple who are determined to have a good time together in spite of all obstacles.
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