Four old friends - Kamil, Lesha, Sasha and Slava - all well-to-do professionals in their late 30s embarking on a two days road trip from Moscow to Odessa. They wish to escape the metropolis and the everyday routine of work, family and girlfriends to relax in a nightclub run by Slava's friend and to see the popular band B-2 show.
Zhenya and Nadya go their separate ways. Nadya stuck with her bureaucrat boyfriend, married him and had a daughter, also called Nadya. Zhenya married and had a son, Konstantin. Both later divorced. More than 30 years later, Konstantin ends up drunk in the flat where the younger Nadya finds him. He is there as part of a convoluted ruse by his father's friends to get Zhenya back into the arms of the woman with whom he shared a magical night. The waylaid son is the bait to get Zhenya back to Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg. One romance is rekindled and another between the son and daughter is struck up.
There is a seven-year war, Russian soldiers are forced to fight for the interests of France and Austria against Prussia. The midshipmen continue to selflessly serve the Motherland. One is on an expedition, the other is at court, and the third is sent to Venice to hand over a jewelry box. In fact, there is a message in the box, on which the future fate of Europe and Russia depends!
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.
