Flights in Dreams and in Reality

Flights in Dreams and in Reality (1983) is a Soviet psychological drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Roman Balayan cast Oleg Yankovsky in the role of a man heading toward forty with very little to show for it. Also on screen: Lyudmila Gurchenko, Oleg Menshikov, and Nikita Mikhalkov.

Sergei Makarov is charming, perceptive, and completely adrift. He has a wife, a younger mistress, a circle of friends, a job that doesn't demand much of him — and none of it sticks. He moves through days filled with small pleasures and quiet failures, unable to commit to anything or anyone. Balayan doesn't explain him or excuse him. He just watches.

Released as a portrait of the stagnation era, the film earned Yankovsky a prize at the Venice Film Festival and remains one of the most precise accounts of Soviet male infantilism ever put on screen. Some films from that period feel like period pieces now. This one doesn't. Stream Flights in Dreams and in Reality (1983) on iFILM.