Vadim Abdrashitov

In a surreal puzzler, this story of a fantasy lived by a disparate group of four men captures the visual imagination with its images and leaves a large question mark in the meantime. The men first get together when called up for military maneuvers in the equivalent of a civilian reserve corps. Since their training is only periodical, two years go by before they are called up again. During this season's maneuvers, they end up being "killed," and so get some time off before they have to go home, and that is when the strange occurrences start. First the men visit a town of beautiful women and go swimming in the buff, then they land on a deserted island, and later, they find themselves with a group of elderly people, one of whom may - or may not - have a connection to one of the men.

In this drama with socio-political nuances, a heroic engineer is able to save the passengers on his train from injury or death by sacrificing his own life when his locomotive crashes. An investigator Ermakov and journalist Malinin are both involved in the story of the crash but from two different angles: the investigator wants to find out why it happened, the journalist wants to laud the heroism of the dead engineer.

A young teenage boy zealously tracks down criminals in this allegorical drama. Using the code name of Plumbum, Ruslan Chutko (Anton Androsov) delights in the pursuits of lawbreakers before informing the police, and he even turns in his own father when he catches him poaching fish. The questions are left to the viewer whether or not Plumbum is a crusading hero or a scoundrel. Western audiences may find the premise implausible, but children were known to inform on their own parents under the regime of Josef Stalin and others.