A screen version of Galina Shcherbakova’s novella Roman and Yulka, a tender melodrama about teenage love.
Katya Shevchenko moves with her parents to a new district of Moscow. On September 1 a new school year begins in a new school, and she meets Roma Lavochkin, a sweet classmate with whom she falls completely in love. Roma feels the same way, but his mother gets involves in the budding relationship between the two teenagers.
Love and Lies is both a poem about pure first love and a film with an ethical message. In 1981, in the journal Iskusstvo kino, the film critic Larisa Kuznetsova called the story of Roma and Katya a pedagogical mirror, writing: «If you remove the romantic cover from the story, this is what you find beneath: our young people often consumed not by the fire of love but by the fire of protest at our adult stupidity, which cannot distinguish good from evil, heartfelt warmth from coldness and heartlessness.» The ethical clarity and touching rationality of the main characters defines the film as an example of Soviet cinema attempting to emphasize a behavioral standard to the viewer.
The song «The Last Poem» written by composer Alexander Rybnikov and first performed by Irina Otieva in 1970, became popular only after the film was released. The haunting melody and dramatic lines «…at night the spring wind bears you a sigh from me» exist in the same poetic space as Roma and Katya’s feelings.
The journal Sovetskii ekran named Love and Lies the best film of 1981. Garage will show a copy of the film restored by Gosfilmofond.
Love and Lies
Director Ilya Frez
USSR, 1980. 86 min. 12+