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Autumn Marathon (dir.Daneliia, 1979)
This film tells the story of Andrei Buzikin, a Leningrad university professor and English-language translator, who has a lot of women making demands on him: a wife, a mistress, a daughter, a colleague. He is unable to say "no" to them and unable to satisfy their expectations of him. On top of all that, a visiting professor from Denmark knocks on his door at the crack of dawn for a daily jog--as if he wasn't already running a marathon, going back and forth among these women. The film is a "sad comedy," telling with humor an ultimately dark story of a man in midlife with little to show for himself spiritually or professionally. Not especially a political film, its importance lies in the very ordinariness of the life it presents.
After winning the Grand Prize at the Chamrousse (France) Festival of Film Comedy, Autumn Marathon was shown in New York, Chicago and LA as part of a tour of contemporary Soviet film. For now, unfortunately, it is the only one of Daneliia's 16 films commercially available with subtitles.
Study questions:
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