2V Studio

Zayats nad Bezdnoy

The film is set in 1971 in Soviet Moldavia.

 Lautar, a poor musician, falls in love with the beautiful Anna, daughter of a powerful and extremely rich Gypsy Baron. The girl returns his feelings but an insuperable barrier separates the lovers. The Baron holds the Gypsy laws in reverence — the daughter of the “most important Gypsy apart from Ismail himself” cannot marry a poor, unknown violin-player. The Baron dreams of his daughter marrying a prosperous man who would give his daughter a wonderful horse as a wedding present.

Lautar is desperate, but the lovers are helped by good luck. Leonid Brezhnev himself visits Soviet Moldavia as a guest of an old war-buddy. With the help of the Gypsy band, Lautar steals the general Secretary’s limousine and presents it to the Baron instead of a pedigree horse.

The strict father approves the young Gypsy’s deed but sets him one more, extremely difficult condition. He demands that Lautar’s matchmaker should also be a baron. Chance helps the musician once again. In the forest, he meets Brezhnev, who has managed to get away from his tedious attendants. After hearing the boy out and drinking a good dose of wine together, the General Secretary agrees to be his matchmaker. Now, it would seem the Baron could not get out of it, yet he finds another excuse he cannot agree to his daughter marrying a “half-breed”: Lautar’s mother was not a Gypsy.

But Brezhnev was not the sort to give in to some Bessarabian Baron. On the spot, in full view of all, he issues and signs an order posthumously making the bridegroom’s mother a Gypsy. Moreover, anticipating yet more tricks from the cunning Baron, he declares that, if the Gypsies do not recognise the order, he, Brezhnev, will recognise all of them as indigenous inhabitants of Siberia. This closes the matter, as recorded for history in a group photograph.

The reason that the General Secretary decided to help the poor musician was very simple. Waxing lyrical, Brezhnev reveals to the Gypsies his own deep secret: he himself has long been hopelessly in love with one famous woman — the Queen of England, but their union was prevented by the Iron Curtain. Yet can that be a real barrier to true Gypsies? The grateful Lautar also decides to help Brezhnev... So, under the blue skies of sunny Moldavia, two dreams are fulfilled at once — that of the unknown violinist and the head of the USSR.

The next day, Brezhnev flies off on business to Delhi, leaving everyone an instructive parable — if a hare is brought to the brink, it leaps off, laughing — because it is free.

Cast: Bogdan Stupka, Sergei Gazarov, Vartan Daraktchyan, Valeria Lanskaya, Yuri Stoyanov, Vladimir Iljin, Mikhail Efremov, Igor Zolotovitskiy, Alena Khmelnitskaya

Genre: Liric Comedy 

Year of Production: 2006