Brief Encounters

Brief Encounters (1967) is a Soviet drama you can watch online on iFILM — Kira Muratova's feature debut, in which she also plays one of the two leads, opposite Nina Ruslanova and Vladimir Vysotsky.

The film works a triangle. Valentina (Muratova), a city housing official, waits for her geologist husband Maksim (Vysotsky) between expeditions. Her new maid Nadia (Ruslanova), a country girl, already knows Maksim — in flashback, from a village encounter that mattered more than he let on. Muratova cuts between timelines without announcing the shifts, the way a memory intrudes on an ordinary afternoon. Vysotsky plays a man constitutionally unable to stay; Muratova plays a woman who has quietly arranged her life around his leaving.

Muratova was fired from Odessa Film Studio after completing the film, and it sat unseen from 1967 until 1987. Stream Brief Encounters online on iFILM — one of the cleaner-eyed Soviet films about what it looks like when two people love the same person who will never quite land.