This intriguing and mysterious romantic drama from 1966 is directed by Armenian film-maker Frunze Dovlatyan; it was entered into competition at Cannes that year and is now rereleased. Hello, It’s Me! often has that kind of freewheeling breeziness that you might associate with the 60s; at other times, I found myself thinking of Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman.
The distinguished Armenian stage and screen actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan plays a fictional young scientist called Artyom, based on the real-life figure of Artem Alikhanian, who during the second world war became one of the pioneers of Soviet nuclear physics. (He shares this distinction, incidentally, with the great Soviet scientist Lev Landau, whose life story was the unlikely inspiration for Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s epic movie installation project Dau.)
Artyom has a deep friendship with his comrade and colleague Oleg (Rolan Bykov) and is deeply in love with Lyusya (Natalya Fateeva). But the war shatters everything in his personal life, even as it accelerates his scientific work. Lyusya – a sergeant in the Red Army – is suddenly ordered to the front, where she is to be killed in action, having had no time to say goodbye to Artyom. Her desperate attempt, as she is scrambling on board a troop train, to get a message to him via a child, is the nearest to a farewell they had. Artyom, meanwhile, is sent to Mount Aragats in the remote Armenian highlands to set up the Cosmic Ray Research Station, considered by the authorities of great wartime importance, and is separated from Oleg.
After the war, there is regret and sadness in Artyom’s life, complicated by an enigmatic new relationship with a beautiful young woman called Tanya (Margarita Terekhova, later to play the lead in Tarkovsky’s Mirror), whose destiny was entwined with Artyom’s from the very beginning. It really is a very strange film: abstruse scientific work is juxtaposed with romanticism, yearning, loneliness, eroticism and a mystified acceptance of the workings of fate.
• Hello, It’s Me! is available from 25 May on Klassiki.
•This article was amended on 24 May 2021 to correct the film’s release date in the standfirst
