Intergirl

Intergirl
Directed by Pyotr Todorovsky
Starring Elena Yakovleva
Vsevolod Shilovsky
Zinovy Gerdt
Lyubov Polishchuk
Ingeborga Dapkunaite
Larisa Malevannaya
Anastasya Nemolyaeva
Distributed by Mosfilm
Release dates
 1989
Running time
 143 minutes
Country Soviet Union
Language Russian

Intergirl (Russian: Интердевочка, translit. InterdEvochka) is a 1989 Soviet drama film. Set in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the time of perestroika during the 1980s, it was the first piece of the popular culture portraying prostitution in the USSR. The film was the most popular Soviet film in 1989 (41.3 million viewers) and made a star of leading actress Elena Yakovleva.

It is the screen adaptation of the eponymous story by Vladimir Kunin (also author of Svolochi).

Movie plot

Swedish client of currency prostitute and at the same time nurse from Leningrad Tanya Zaitseva suddenly makes her a marriage proposal. After another conversation with the police she goes with good news back home to her mother, who thinks that her daughter is just a nurse. Tanya did not hide the fact that she is getting married not for love, but because she wants to have an apartment, a car, money and dreams "to see the world with my own eyes." In a conversation with her mother she argues that prostitution is characteristic of all trades, "all sell themselves." However, the mother can not imagine that Tatiana sells herself in the truest sense of the word.

Tanya's former client and now fiance  Ed Larsen (in the book Edward Larsen) is a pass for Tanya in the Western world of dreams. However, on her way gets the Soviet bureaucracy: to travel to Sweden Tanya needed help. The heaviest price she gets help from her father, whom she has not seen for 20 years. He requires 3,000 rubles for permission for emigration - a lot of money in those days. Tanya has to re-engage in prostitution to get the money.

Sweden very quickly bored heroine. The only outlet for her become Russian truck drivers working in the "Sovtransavto", through whom she sends gifts to his mother in Leningrad. Swedish "friends" not for a moment forget how Tanya earned in the USSR. Ed really loves his wife, but is always making comments about her habits. Tanya - absolutely a stranger in a strange world. She wants to visit his mother. Meanwhile prostitute girlfriend Tanya says over the phone that the USSR at her opened case on "speculation" (for illegal currency transactions was another article, with very strict sanctions) for illegal currency exchange. Investigators come to Tanya's mother and reveals the secrets of her daughter's high earnings. Morally broken mother-teacher commits suicide, household gas poisoning in his apartment. Skein, a neighbor of Tanya, smells gas at the site, bursts into the apartment, knocks out the window, pulls her mother to court and unsuccessfully tries to save her, raises the alarm. She struggled in vain knocking on the door to the neighbors. At this moment in Sweden Tanya turns as if to hear the knock. She feels that there was something terrible. In a panic, she jumps into the car, goes to the airport and breaks. The drama of the final episode reinforces the Russian folk song "Tramp" ("In the wild steppes of Transbaikalia ..."), which is the leitmotif of the film.

Awards

3 wins and 1 nomination. Elena Yakovleva has won the Best Actress award at Nika, 1990, and Tokyo International Film Festival, 1989.

External links

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