Malenkaya Vera

Plot synopsis:
Young Vera is a woman in her late teens who loves to listen to American and Western European rock and pop music and wears clothes and make up inspired by some of her idols such as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Debbie Harry. She lives with her mother and her alcoholic father, Kolya, who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her choice of friends and what they consider her decadent lifestyle. They wonder why she can’t be more like her brother Victor, a doctor living in Moscow. At an underground dance party that is broken up by police, she meets Sergei, and they immediately fall in love. It turns out Sergei is an old friend of Victor, who, in town for a visit, calls on his friend only to find him alone with his sister.
Vera and Sergei decide to marry, but her parents object. Vera convinces them to accept the planned marriage by falsely telling her mother she is pregnant. Sergei’s first meeting with her parents is disastrous, and he leaves with Vera without finishing dinner, but he soon comes to live with them.
The tension between Sergei and Kolya increases and comes to a climax on Kolya’s birthday. Fed up with the drunken Kolya, Sergei locks him in the bathroom, where he breaks the basin. When he is let out of the bathroom, he stabs Sergei in the side with a knife, the wound requiring a long convalescence in the hospital.
Vera’s mother tries to convince her to tell the authorities that Sergei accidentally caused the wound to himself, to avoid Kolya being sent to prison. Victor, visiting from Moscow, prescribes tranquilizers to calm the despondent Vera. The family goes to the beach for a picnic, ostensibly to help take Vera’s mind off the situation. Vera believes, however, that it is a ruse to persuade her to lie about the stabbing. A storm suddenly comes up, and as the family prepares to leave, Vera is nowhere to be found. Kolya searches for her and the two are seen embracing on the beach.
Vera testifies that her father was not to blame for what happened to Sergei. She visits him in the hospital and explains that the family needed Kolya to survive. Sergei now seems uninterested in her, and tells her to go away.
Back in her apartment, she finds herself alone and starts drinking and taking the pills. Victor arrives and rescues her. Sergei escapes from the hospital and soon arrives on the scene.
When Vera asked Sergei why he came back, he replies, "Because I was scared". As the film ends, Vera asks Sergei if he loves her.
Kolya sits alone in the kitchen once Vera has been put to bed. He slowly collapses and calls out to Victor and then Vera. It is assumed that he dies.
A subplot involves Andrey, a former classmate of Vera, who is infatuated with her and wants her to marry him. At the beginning of the film, Andrey is about to leave for naval training and attempts to persuade Vera to come home with him, but she spurns his advances. Later, she meets him on her way home from the hospital after visiting Sergei. He explains that he is on leave for only one day and again tries to arrange a tryst, only to have Vera resort to physical violence to fend him off when he attempts to force himself on her.

Tags: romantic

Review:
Here is an attempt at comparison: It is as if during the last years of Saddam's rule, a filmmaker in Iraq were somehow able to make a film, which, for the first time ever, showed life as it really was lived in that country.
If you could imagine that unlikely event, then you might have an idea of what went on with this film in the last few years of the Soviet Union.
Prior to this film, Soviet cinema was highly censored.
Soviet movies would only show an ideal life in the worker's paradise.
The alcoholism, the random sex, the ugly wasteland that was the Soviet city, the choking pollution, the proletariat victimizing each other and themselves, the utter hopelessness - it is all there.
To the Soviet viewers at the time, the sex was a minor event compared to fact that it portrayed reality for the first time in Soviet cinema.
Other reviewers see it as a film about a dysfunctional Russian family.
One even says that it is difficult to feel sorry for Vera because she keeps coming back to her family.
The point is that Vera and her family are symbols for all of Soviet life.
This was life in the Soviet Union for most people.
This is a film that can be viewed on many levels: as a drama it traces the landscape of despair, as a social document it shows the living conditions of the time, as a political document it shows the attitude of the people and many of the reasons for the break-up of the Soviet Union, and as a moral document it shows the evils of a dictatorship that is out of control, and the cruelties that victims will practice on each other.
Little Vera clearly shows the human toll that Socialism eventually takes on its victims, despite any good intentions that system may have.
Forget every spy movie you've ever seen - this is what life was like in the USSR, and still is in many places in Russia and the ex-Soviet countries.
Vera dreams of life of leisure, as she imagines the West to be; her reality is very different, with a bitter mother, a violent father, and the ever-present alcohol.
She finds a man and they try to patch up a life together, but he is afflicted by the same environment, both socially and physically - the scenery in this movie is brilliant, sitting comfortably in the company of post-apocalyptic movies but obviously done with no special effects; they have just walked in and shot whatever happened to be in front of the camera.Forget your stereotyped, cold Russians of spy movies.
One of the major aspects of "Malenkaya Vera" (called "Little Vera" in English) is that it was the first movie from the Soviet Union that featured a sex scene, albeit a short one.
The title is important: Vera is the Russian word for "faith", identifying that punk Vera (Natalya Negoda) has little faith in the Soviet system.
When Vera's lover Sergei (Andrey Sokolov) moves in with her family, it leads to some unexpected events.Like in many Russian movies, people's names describe their characters.
All in all, this is a good look at the Soviet Union while it was collapsing - and we can see why it was collapsing.
Vera, the protagonist in the film Little Vera, lives in a closed, cramped world.
The family apartment represents Vera's closed world in the simplest sense.
However, the family apartment is only one way that the director maintains this constant feeling of confinement.
Throughout the film, Vera is rarely shown at a distance.
Vera's family is constantly in conflict and even the most civil dinner eventually erupts into argument.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Vera at the end of the movie, but is our sympathy justified?
Everyone keeps saying Russia, but I grew up in the Soviet Union, and I can't really call it an exclusively Russian film like everyone else.
Ironically, this movie was filmed in Zhdanov(Mariupol), which is now a part of Ukriane.
Even moving wouldn't help, cause the whole area of the former Soviet Union later became a total cesspool of violent crime and drug/alcohol addiction.During the late 80's, right before the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a plethora of similar films, but for some weird reason only this one was known outside of the country.
There were films with worse sex scenes before and after this one, and unlike many other countries, there was no censorship, so TV was full of nudity at the time.
This era of Soviet film was actually called "Chernuha" which translates as darkness, despair, gritty.
Indeed, if Moonlight took place in the 80's Soviet Union, and instead of drugs people were drinking, it would fit right in.
Some scenes are almost identical with those Soviet films.
(i.e. filming a pot on a stove for a good 1 minute or so, or a character is staring at something or thinking for a long time.) I actually seen a lot of them when I was a kid, but it took me decades to watch most of them again.
Even this film would have probably been lost if it wasn't for this unusual international hype about it because of some naive sex scene.
It was also sort of disturbing to see how she was calling him names and screaming at him when she was drunk, which followed by a scene where he was alone watching a silly cartoon on TV about staying away from Africa because it has dangerous animals, while it's very obvious that life for this kid with black skin in that hell hole of a town is probably worse than being in an African jungle...The film is as real as it gets.
The life was like this for most of the Soviet Union back then.
So the name of the film in Russian means also "A very little hope"..
In Russia, the ordinary teenager Vera (Natalya Negoda) lives a leisured life with her drunkard father and her simpleton mother, without working and waiting for the calling for a technical course of telephone operator.
Her brother Victor (Aleksandr Negreba) lives in Moscow with the family of his own and occasionally visits his dysfunctional family and Vera, being always motive for arguing.
When Vera meets the student of university Sergei (Andrei Sokolov), they fall in love for each other and decide to get married.
Sergei moves to Vera's house, but lives in conflict with her father.
This relationship leads the family to a tragedy.I have just seen "Malenkaya Vera", and I liked a lot this deep family drama.
Many difficulties of Vera's family and their friends, the repression in the park and other situations pictured in the movie are common in Third World countries.
Maybe my title is a bit too much but it's the best way i found to depict this late soviet drama movie: as the funny American show, it's about a low income dysfunctional family with a sweet mother, a hard- working but grumpy father, a studious brother and a free daughter!
The cast is really good and this little Vera is moving as every lost souls I can meet in my films travels!
Little Vera is the story of a Russian teenager, her family, and her attempts to find meaning and value in a life sliding increasingly into decay.
In her search for meaning, she falls in love with a more intellectual and rebellious Sergei, whose hatred for her deeply flawed parents quickly spirals out of control.Little Vera is shocking and disturbing in nearly every way.
The drinking of the father, the enabling and lack of understanding of the mother, the casual lies and misdirection of the brother, and Vera herself forgiving them all their flaws are all shocking and slightly disturbing to watch.
Set in cramped spaces and vast urban decay, Little Vera presented a vastly different view of Soviet life than had ever been seen before.
In fact, Little Vera is a portrait of the collapse of Soviet society painted in shades of pain, desperation, and rust.
It is the implosion of a family set against the implosion of an entire social order.Although painful and desperately unsatisfying, the film itself is definitely worth seeing, if only to understand the feelings and cultures still reshaping Russia today..
). A movie about common people, their problems, lack of satisfactions - especially for young ones, fear when touch the real and too dirty face of the society ...
Sergei starts living with the family but it doesn't go well in one violent drunken confrontation.The film looks pretty grainy and weak compared to most indies of that time.
It was sold as the first sex scene in Soviet cinema but there is nothing erotic about this movie.
It's fine as a grungy indie and notable for being a Soviet film..
This movie was groundbreaking in the former Soviet Union because it was the first movie released there that contained a real sex scene.
However, the movie can be considered great for many reasons, not the least of which is its true, gritty portrayal of disillusionment and pain in the family of a working class Soviet family.
This once notorious drama (at least in its own country) was hailed as a breakthrough when first released simply for daring to show modern Soviet life without the usual State-approved propaganda halo, in all its actual anti-bureaucratic grubbiness.
But watching the film on this side of the erstwhile Iron Curtain only reinforces the notion that Soviet youth culture is thirty years behind the rest of the world: despite the often oppressive details it might be just another quaint teen delinquency relic from early 1960s Hollywood, dubbed into Russian and updated with casual sex and drug abuse.
You really think that the Soviets were all prostitutes, drunks, delinquents, and no-goods living off their parents?
As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union, I can swear on the Bible that nothing can be as remote from the truth as this portrayal of everyday Soviet life.It looks like "Little Vera" was made with two goals in mind: to defame everything Soviet and to make a big buck out of showing some insipid soft-core sex, nudity, and drug use.
Don't get me wrong – I'm a big fan of Western sleaze and all things exploitation (what else one would want to watch in post-Soviet Russia?), but "Little Vera" is different.
What I found so interesting about this film was the incredible contrast of subject matter and mood between this film and the Russian films that came before it.A product of Glasnost, in an attempt to modernize the cinema and remove censorship, allowed for Russians to be shown realistically and their individual stories be told instead of a happy Russian body of agreeable people.The film addresses the reality of dysfunctional families, crammed into small apartments, alcoholism, poverty, and young adults confused and rebelling against authority.Little Vera depicts Vera and her family with attitudes of hopelessness, apathy and loneliness.I liked the movie for the fact that it is ground breaking  showing problematic issues and stories of individuals that were never or could never be shown on screen previously under oppressive governments.I personally wouldn't watch it again.
Once was enough for me because I hated all the characters and was left depressed after watching a movie where people are constantly fighting but that- I think is the point of the film..
A gritty presentation of the decay of family values and human dignity in the wake of Soviet communism, Vasili Pichul's 1988 film Little Vera is a landmark film of modern Russian cinema.
A contemporary Ukrainian setting further intensifies the effect, first by the immediacy of the film to its time period, second by its utilization of a locale not only struggling for identity in lieu of a Soviet system, but also as a nation distinct from the Russian idiom that had dominated the U.S.S.R.Vera, the film's title character and protagonist, is a rebellious adolescent girl with a "dysfunctional" family including a hard-drinking father and a mother care-worn.
Tensions escalate until Vera's father drunkenly stabs Sergei.
Vera must decide if she will stay loyal to her intolerable family by testifying her father acted in self-defense, or continue to support and defend the ever-detached Sergei.
Unbearable in almost every imaginable way, Little Vera masterfully captures and communicates the inescapable void left in social life after the collapse of communism.
The sexual aggressiveness of the film (it was the first film to show explicit sex) combined with the unrelenting presentation of social reality (a marked distinction from the socialist realism demanded by Stalin) effectively confronted the conditions of former-Soviet life.
Because no easy solution presents itself, some viewers will hate the film and filmmakers for "bringing up" the issue.
Many films come to mind as somewhat comparable in this regard: Larry Clark's Kids, Harmony Korine's Gummo, even popular movie's such as John Hughes' Breakfast Club.
I recommend this film to those viewers for whom the prospect of nearly two hours excruciating domestic conflict and social miasma is not overly daunting.
Despite the difficulties of watching the film, some moments within it are profoundly beautiful.
Maybe that's an explanation why "Little Vera" did not impress me much, no matter how "daring" it was for the soviet standards.
This is one of the worst movies I've seen in my life.
If you are looking for a soviet film along those lines, then forget "Little Vera" and watch "Avariya doch menta" (Avariya the Cop's Daughter).It's a rough social drama about the youth subcultures during the turbulent period of the Perestroika and it offers much more action and tension than "Little Vera".I thought that "Little Vera" would be something similar and although it's beginning was somewhat promising, I soon realized that my expectations were wrong.After some scenes of parties and violence, the movie slowed down and for the next hour and a half, it's protagonists were only mumbling something among themselves.
Nothing much was happening, until suddenly everyone went nuts and almost killed each other for no apparent reason."Little Vera" is overrated just because it was the first soviet movie with a more explicit erotic scenes and it's main actress Natalya Negoda became the first real soviet sex symbol.
Explicit erotica was a shocking novelty for the soviet audience in those days, but naked breasts and simulated sex alone do not make a movie great.Speaking of drugs, there is some abuse of legal tranquilizers mixed with alcohol in the film, but this is not a story about heroin addicts or something like that, as some of you may expected.The "rocknroll" in "Little Vera" is actually the bubble gum pop singer Sofia Rotaru, who was already 40 at the time of the filming.
In comparison, "Avariya doch menta" features punk rock and heavy metal music, which was much more dangerous and radical in those days.The Wall Street Journal's "Sex, drugs & rocknroll" description only partially fits "Little Vera" and it's misguiding to a large extent.
And it's not really a "hit movie" as the Time Magazine said.
On the contrary, "Little Vera" is more a sort of psychological drama.Some of the movie posters that I found online are also misguiding.
or even an action-comedy.I'm not so much disappointed by the movie itself, but I'm more disappointed by it's inaccurate description and the exaggerated praise in the media.I understand that "Little Vera" has some qualities.
It was noticed not only for it's explicit erotica, but also for it's social commentary.It shows the depressing provincial towns of the Soviet Union and families living in small claustrophobic flats.
It shows how the youngsters began to rebel against the authority during the Perestroika.Vera's father is depicted as a drunk, while her mother is like "what the neighbors will think".
You get the picture.Back then this was considered a brave social criticism.But anyway, the film left me completely emotionless.
I felt absolutely no sympathy or compassion for Vera, even less for her boyfriend Sergei (Andrey Sokolov), who behaves like an arrogant pr****.Even the drunk father was a more interesting character in the film than both of them, though they are the main protagonists in it.If you are looking for more "edgy" films about the youths in the former USSR, then watch the aforementioned "Avariya doch menta", then "Menya zovut Arlekino", "Patsany", "Rokovaya oshibka", "Luna Park" or the more recent "Lilja 4-ever"..
In a dull Russian industrial town, a young woman (Natalya Negoda) without plans for her life mixes with a heavy-drinking crowd and enjoys casual sex.
Little Vera was the leader in ticket sales in the Soviet Union in 1988, and was the most successful Soviet film in the US since Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears (1979).This ultra-realistic look at life caused an uproar in Russia on its release; it certainly marks a change from state-approved films glorifying communism and collectivism.
Yet though its reputation precedes it, Little Vera seems unexceptional by western standards, though decidedly bleak..
poor little Vera.
There was a lot about Little Vera that was strange to me.
All in all I did enjoy this movie, but a lot of the way the characters behaved was not what I was used to.
For example the environment that Vera's family lived in was very tense.
Almost every time the family was together they were either drinking, fighting or yelling and frequently it was a combination of the three.
I was however very interested in watching the story if this middle class Russian family.
The only time a character was not yelling was when Vera first fell in love with her fiancé Sergei.
Another time Vera is told that the only reason she was born was so the family could get a larger apartment.
It is very interesting watching how both Vera and the family were able to cope with each other's behavior.
The film was definitely worth watching because of its depiction of how life could be in areas of Russia.