Love like Rain: Sergey Solovyov’s Early Films

The article is devoted to the first film trilogy by the Russian director Sergei Solovyov, which tells and describes the story of teenage love. The author notes that, unlike “school love”, the theme of which was popular in secular cinema of that time, the works he analyzes continue and rethink love relationships based on the Russian classical literary tradition. These works paradoxically combine visual scenes of Russian nature and a dense auditory component. The characters of all three films speak a lot and meaningfully, listen to one another, engage in intricate dialogues, thereby forcing the viewer to “actively listen to the movie”, and not just watch it, which is common nowadays. Each of the films contains a basic literary work or an author who either inspires the heroes or highlights their specific psychological traits from the past. The internal form of love that ultimately unites the characters of all three films turns out to be close to the New Testament form of love expressed by the Apostle Paul. This love is not pragmatic, selfish and is close to the Platonic form of love, although not entirely. As a result of the study, the author points out that love “not as passion” and “not as clouding” should have a minimum of “sympathy” and ordinary human attention. The heroes of these films do not possess this quality, and it is extremely difficult to show the presence of this anthropological characteristic by means of modern cinema. Modern youth cinema, as a rule, understands love and demonstrates love through physical contact and actions.