A young country girl, Parasha (Vera Maretskaya) lands a job as a servant in Moscow and gets her first taste of the middle classes when she becomes entangled in the lives of the residents of this block of flats on Trubnaya Square. (In a movement that perhaps signals Godard of many years later, the downtrodden girl becomes transformed when she sees a play about Joan of Arc.) An observant, witty, essentially loving character sketch of a community that never seems to stop to catch its breath, the film is spiced with some well-placed anti-bureaucratic barbs and filled with cinematic surprises, from surrealism, to stop-motion, to burlesques of other Soviet stylists (Eisenstein and his crowds, Vertov and his tramcars).