Following the long-delayed and vetted "I'm Twenty," Male Huzyev's next film, The July Rain (1967), reveals little about his Georgian origins.
Hutzyev was a Georgian-born Muscovite, and like his fellow Georgian compatriot Joseph Stalin, his identity was more attached to the Soviet capital than to his native Georgia.
In July Rain, Moscow is not just a pure backdrop, but once again a real protagonist, and Huzyev spares no effort to show the charm and prosperity of the city on par with the metropolises of Western Europe.
According to Peter Bagrov, curator of the Russian National Film Foundation, "July Rain" is partly an "abstract urban symphony" and partly a "study of the 'new society'", and is his "most perfect", if not the best film of Huzyev.
The heroine Lena (Yevgenia Ulalova) and the actor Volodiya (Alexander Beliawski) are a pair of boyfriend and girlfriend who worry about their careers every day (should Lena go to graduate school?). Can Volodiya find a publisher for his latest paper? He also joined other young intellectuals in funky and boring evenings and picnics by the lake in the suburbs.
Topics among intellectuals often involved modernization ("telephone and airplane bringing people together"), and there were always quotations from the scriptures mixed with a few verses, the charismatic warm man Alex, who played the guitar, sang simple and enthusiastic folk songs, and the amiable Professor Lyova lightly judged the state of freedom of thought in the Soviet Union ("I am embarrassed not to cause any trouble now").
This group of people is not so much oppressed by soviet cultural policies as they are just Antonioni-style boredom.
"The July Rain" and Huzyev's first film constituted the "two sides of the same body" of what Bargrov called "Ode to the Ancient Capital." (Film historian Neyah Zokaya wrote of The July Rain, "Moscow has found its poets.") ）
In July Rain, Huzyev often likes to follow shots with long shots (the only one he has taken this form), showing well-dressed crowds in the city's business districts (many pedestrians notice cameras, giving these semi-documentary-style images some resemblance to the Renaissance portraits interspersed with them).
With Louis Armstrong's "Life of the Rose", the footage of foreign ambassadors and military attachés coming out of the Mercedes is interesting.
If it weren't for the fact that road signs and awnings are full of Cyrillic letters, the streets of Moscow in "The July Rain" would have made the perfect impression like the boulevards of Paris.
At one party, a young couple in turtleneck sweaters and sunglasses even danced the classic dance from Godard's Outlaw.
Although "July Rain" sometimes feels a lack of originality, there are also some vivid creative moments, such as the headlights of slow-moving cars sweeping over the pale trunks of birch trees in the night forest, visually and concisely metaphorically metaphorically for the Soviet Union.