A Noisy Day

Watch A Noisy Day (1961) online on iFILM — a Soviet drama co-directed by Georgy Natanson and Anatoly Efros, adapted from Viktor Rozov's play In Search of Joy. A Moscow family shares an apartment: a mother and four adult children. One unremarkable afternoon, a wardrobe brought in by the eldest son's new wife becomes the flashpoint for everything the household has been holding down.

The furniture is not the point. What breaks loose is an argument between those who have learned to accommodate and those for whom accommodation is simply impossible. The youngest son Oleg, sixteen years old, is the one who says it out loud. Oleg Tabakov — twenty-six at the time, early in what would become one of Soviet cinema's longest careers — plays him with a fury that makes the adults look like they stopped living years ago. Valentina Sperantova, Inna Gulaya, and Liliya Tolmachyova fill out the family.

Efros had staged the same play at the Central Children's Theatre before the film was made; the screen version kept his temperature — urgent, undidactic, and unwilling to tidy up what life doesn't tidy up. Stream A Noisy Day online on iFILM.