The House I Live In (1957)
1935. Two families — Davydov's with three children and the newlyweds Lida and Dmitri Kashirin's — enter the new house on the outskirts of Moscow into a common communal apartment. The children grow up, and they and the adults around them are looking for their place in life, looking for answers to the questions of who to be and what to be, quarreling, making peace, building relationships, destroying them. Six years later, the peaceful lives of characters, with their joys and misfortunes, quarrels and reconciliations, and complex personal relationships, are blown up by a war that connects everyone at once, forcing them to see the meaning of their days, their attitudes to each other and their life values in a different way. For some of them, war is a fatal trait.
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Best movie ever!
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.
A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
They do not show war in this film, they show people and their dreams and hopes ruined by the war. It is not just another "war film", but it rises to the level of a true Tragedy. Not a propagandist or a sob story. Many critics compare this film to another famous Russian war drama, The Cranes Are Flying. I still think that The House I Live in is better, though, if you've seen The Cranes and liked it, most probably you'll love this one either. Both films were shot in 1957 and treat the war theme from the similar humane perspective. I wouldn't cut a single shot from the film, all of them are just in place. I do not know if it can be found outside Russia, if yes, don't miss it.
I've seen the movie by 1960, i.e. 40 years ago... I remember very little of it. This is a movie about the war and human feelings, about impossible and forbidden love, about death and separation. By far better (although in the same line) than "Letiat zhuravli" which took a grand prize at the Cannes festival. What a pity that such profoundly HUMANE and TRUE movies are absent from the TV screens... I am happy to have rediscovered, through your database, at least some technical details about such a marvel. But there's no comment, no images. Sorry...