Once in Trubchevsk – Odnazhdy v Trubchevske (2019)

Directed by: Larisa Sadilova | 90 minutes | drama | Actors: Kristii Schneider, Egor Barinov, Yuri Kiselev, Mariya Semyonova, Valentina Kozova, Viktor Bogatkin, Aleksandra Bobkovskaya

Trubchevsk is an inconspicuous village southwest of Moscow, about 500 kilometers from the Russian capital. There is no demonstrable reason to have a movie story set here, and that is both the strength and the weakness of ‘Once in Trubchevsk’. This simple little drama could have been played out in countless equally anonymous places.

Egor is a truck driver and married to Tamara. They have a teenage son together, who spends time gaming and hanging out with his friends. Yura, his mother, his wife Anna and daughter live right next to Egor and Tamara. The jobs are not up for grabs in Trubchevsk, so that Anna regularly travels to the big city to sell her creative knits there is a necessity.

What Yura and Tamara don’t know, however, is that the bus Anna takes doesn’t take her much further than the village border. Yura faithfully takes her to the bus stop, urges his wife to call him, but the bus ride only takes a short while and Anna gets out again. She waits at the edge of the road for Egor and his truck to stop in front of her. Once in the middle of winter, he unexpectedly leaves her for an hour. It puts a damper on the romance.

It doesn’t seem to bother them that the duo takes risks with this state of affairs. They haven’t been caught yet and regularly steal a few nights together. Meanwhile, Egor Anna keeps promising to tell Tamara the truth, so that the way for their future together will be open.

“Once in Trubchevsk” in this relationship is not much different from other dramas about cheating. Maybe it’s cliché, but maybe it’s just a reflection of reality: that in such cases the man is always too cowardly to make the decision and keeps telling his mistress that everything will be okay. Incidentally, it is not really clear why the two are cheating. You are already confronted with this at the start of the film, so you do not get that the marriage with Tamara and Yura respectively would not be good for Egor and Anna. In fact, the relationship between Egor and Anna sometimes resembles a marriage, which has turned into a rut after years. Only in an unexpected dance scene do you get a glimpse of the attraction between Egor and Anna.

‘Once in Trubchevsk’ is well acted and beautifully portrayed, but the story doesn’t drag you along. The characters remain too superficial for that and the setting is too interchangeable. What must be the oldest cast member on the role delivers another captivating monologue about how she grew up in the modest house where Anna moves in later in the film. Her story about how her mother and sisters had to survive during World War II almost deserves a film of its own.