In My Friend IvanLapshin, Alexei Gherman (Trial on the Road, Twenty Days Without War)once again turns the writings of his father, novelist Yuri Gherman, intodazzling cinema. Set in the winter of 1935, Ivan Lapshin marvelously,mysteriously reconstructs the mood of an era-a strange kind of calm justbefore the Stalinist storm. The film is warm and comical, dark andominous by turns, and so filled with locale and time-related detailsthat it is, in these ways, indeed foreign to the average American. (Thefact that Gherman's hero is a well liked NKVD agent is one of theelements in the film best understood by Soviet audiences.) Much of theaction takes place in a crowded communal apartment whererelationships-who is what to whom-also are a bit mysterious andabstract, but it doesn't matter: Gherman's expressive camera, with itsodd framings, its penetrating tracking shots, its refusal of thestandard reverse shot, captures a sense of burgeoning life andimpossible poverty, in the apartment as in the small provincial townwhere it is located. Here, Ivan Lapshin, "our local Pinkerton," alreadysomething of a legend, is on the trail of some particularly nastycriminals. But the lanky, dour Lapshin's fearless pursuit of gangsterscontrasts comically with his almost total haplessness with women. So thefilm's climax falls on his raid on a thieves' hideaway rather than onhis daring and disastrous climb up the drainpipe to proposition his truelove.