Chuciev’s characters love their country and continue believing it is unique, in the convinction that they live in utopia, despite the still open wound: the Stalinist terror, the war, at times are confusing. But standing out above everything else is the fact that they move around, whether it is Dva Fëdora (The two Fedors), Mne dvadcat’ let (I Am Twenty) or this latest film. They might know or not know where they are going, like the woman who is the main character of July Rain, but they move around anyway, they change, proof of dissatisfaction and of searching. They are the antithesis of cinema’s big heroes. Their movement is matched by that of the camera. On the opening credits, a long dolly shot insistently follows the woman down the Moscow streets and she turns towards the camera with irritated curiosity, The cinema of the thaw also liberated the film camera, which for a long time had been fixed on the actors. The camera would take flight, at times pompously, but here it does so much more deliberately.
Seemingly the twin of I Am Twenty, July Rain is marked by disenchantment, as remembered by the scriptwriter Anatolij Grebnev: “At the end of the Sixties we felt the risk of indifference. Words which a few years before were alive and new were now losing their meaning and disappearing. The ideals that people had suffered for were being converted into money in the daily life of others. So, everything we believed in was being wiped out in front of our eyes”.
In the final frames, when the characters of the film have already disappeared, some young people remain, speechless, in front of a meeting of veterans, who are singing the Red Army’s march towards Berlin. Chuciev spoke about it with Giovanni Buttafava: “I particulary love the ending with the gathering of veterans near the Bolshoi Theatre. Almost by chance, I noticed those periodical meetings, which nobody had thought to film. I decided not to start the action but to film it in the moment: the extras did not know when they were being filmed. On seeing the results, I decided not to mix that materal with the story, but to leave it as it was, intact, a poetic digression” (Giovanni Buttafava, Aldilà del sogno, Ubulibri, Milano 1987).
Maybe it was because of the weight of history that Chuciev preferred to distance himself from creation and dedicate himself to teaching. But his films remain.

Bernard Eisenschitz