A young Russian doctor, Mikhail Polyakov, came to a small clinic in a remote village, and having just graduated from medical school, he had little experience, worked hard and won the recognition of his colleagues. During a severe pain, he asked the nurse Anna to give him morphine to relieve the stress, and gradually became addicted to it...
The film begins, in the snow, the train pulls into a remote station, where the young doctor begins his career.
He seemed to be able to do everything from delivering a misplaced fetus for the first time, to amputation of a patient's limb, to cutting the trachea for diphtheria, and to seeing gynecology, although at the beginning, he did not understand, and immediately went to read books to solve the surgical problem, but it did not prevent him from getting the respect of nurses, patients, and families. He experienced the satisfaction of authority and power in their repeated active devotions.
The story is set in 1917, an eventful era, with successive revolutions spreading to major cities, and the remote Siberian countryside where the doctor is located has not yet been affected. With his prestige and power, he developed a dependence on morphine. In order to satisfy his "drug addiction", Polakov on the one hand ordered the nurse Anna to dispense medicines, inject him, and the dose became larger and larger, resulting in his drug addiction getting bigger and bigger. The doctor decided to go to the hospital in the district for drug rehabilitation.
As Polakov's "drug addiction" grew larger and larger, the war of the revolution became closer and closer, a serious fire, resulting in a serious lack of morphine in the hospital, many patients died in pain, which greatly shocked Polakov's heart, he blamed himself, more fearful, he went to the downtown hospital adjacent to the town to rehabilitate, and finally died of despair due to failure.
Apparently, the director used morphine as a symbol of power. He can be unbridled, profligate, morphine addiction of course can not be quit, power worship is equally difficult to quit.
After failing to rehabilitate in the hospital, the doctors walked to the streets of this town that condensed the then Russian at that time. Smashing and looting, harsh interrogation, hiding in orthodox churches still injecting himself with morphine, encountering colleagues who tried to rob morphine, he shot and killed it, this is a showdown of power.
He stumbled into the cinema, and in the midst of the comedy of the crowd, the doctor injected himself with a large dose of morphine again, laughed with the audience, and then calmly shot himself in the head.
The cold tone, calm music and concise dialogue in the pale land of Russia play a medical career that once had ideals and ambitions, and did not hesitate to leave the big city to devote himself to the medical career in the remote mountain villages.
In the snow-scorched sky, the anger of the October Revolution burned all over the land, and all the laughter and pain were "present" or "absent" under the white light of no sun and no moon. A crisp gunshot, mixed with the laughter of the cinema, played a new era prelude.
Every life is meant to be said goodbye. Social, political, emotional, all the same. Some diseases can be cured, and some diseases cannot be cured. Like addictive morphine, power only ends at the end of life.
Alexei Barabanov died at the age of 54. The ghost director who died young gave his film a deeper connotation and more acute.
The scale of the film is slightly larger, the picture may bring you discomfort, please look at the picture carefully.
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