This film is of interest primarily because it contains within it the entire surviving footage of an unfinished 1974 film by the same director, Slave of Love, which was successfully remade shortly thereafter by another director, Nikita Mikhalkov.The "cover" story is about a woman (Jeanne Moreau) newly released from prison camps in the 1940s back into Russian society, who finds that there is no place for her in the world she has come back to. However, this painterly film is so filled with striking and surreal imagery that it would be misleading to say that the story is of any great importance in relation to that.
The heroes of the film are students of a pedagogical university, those who, after a year or two, have to carry knowledge to schoolchildren, "to sow the rational, good, eternal." In the meantime, student practice. True, the practice is not quite ordinary, because for the first time students leave far from the walls of their own university, for the first time they meet with students in the classroom not in the presence of their teachers, those with whom life encounters them daily at the institute, but with those who have been working for more than a year at school.
