An existential fable in sci-fi form, based on a work by the Strugatsky brothers.
In 2000, the film was included in the 100 best films of all time according to the Russian Guild of Film Critics.
Pediatrician Dmitry Malyanov works in a hospital in a remote town in Turkmenia and in his spare time is researching the theme of «Juvenile high blood pressure in Old Believer families, ” examining the correlation between childhood illness and the spiritual health of their parents. He is living in an incomprehensible and alien environment, surrounded by pessimism and an atmosphere of the breakdown of human connections. Malyanov starts receiving frightening calls and telegrams, which are followed by events that are difficult to explain.
Sokurov’s second feature after almost ten years of being a banned director is predictably about the theme of choice, vocation, and a person’s place in a world that places pressure on them from all angles. Sokurov mainly borrows the issues of enmity and the resistance of the environment, which take on metaphysical dimensions, from the Strugatsky brothers’ novella, but he and his screenwriter Yuri Arabov change the details and the plot of the original. The action moves from Leningrad to Central Asia, to the small Turkmen town where Sokurov spent his childhood and where his family continued to live at the time of shooting. Sokurov incorporated a great deal of documentary material and observations and, working with non-professional actors and a familiar environment, was able to create a voluminous and convincing film about the coming apocalypse that in many ways predicted the final collapse of the Soviet project. It is a multi-layered existential fable in which the consequences of the colonization of the East and suffocating Soviet policies become the background for a personal drama of salvation, self-sacrifice, and finding meaning in serving others.
Days of Eclipse
Director Alexander Sokurov
USSR, 1988, 139 min. 12+
