KOSMOS KAK PREDCHUVSTVIE – DREAMING OF SPACE (ALEKSEI UCHITEL, RUSSIA)

kinomania.ru

Set in Russia near the Finnish border in the winter of 1957 after Sputnik's launch, Dreaming of Space is a nice character piece and glimpse into how Russians view their own past. Yevgeny Mironov stars as "Horsie", a young man full of restless energy but naïve about how his meager hopes and dreams might survive in a small Communist town. At the gym he meets a tall, strong, mysterious man (Yevgeny Tzyganov) who he tries desperately to befriend. This man is everything Horsie is not: quiet, dignified and capable. Eventually the two men do develop a bond, though Horsie has suspicions about his new friend, as in he may be plotting an escape either by swimming for freedom or maybe even flying away somehow. Is this man a spy or a defector or, as he claims, a cosmonaut secretly training for the day they put a man into one of those rockets? Horsie is an interesting character, and well played by Mironov, and Tzyganov has great fun playing the more stoic yet still charming Gherman. The narrative gets a bit bogged down in plotlines involving Horsie's girlfriend and her sister (Irina Pegova and Yelena Lyadova), and there are some intentionally awkward editing jumps toward the last third of the film that detract from the pace and tone that narrative had been traveling. But the loving recreation of late '50s Mother Russia and the souls left dreaming inside of her borders despite the cold darkness, drawing inspiration from each other and grand ideas like space travel, is delightful.