One of the most successful Soviet films of recent years, with critics and audiences in dozens of countries, The Slave of Love had its U.S. Premiere at the Los Angeles FILMEX, where Richard Whitehall placed it among "...the true excitements and chief justifications of a film festival...from its superb pre-title sequence to its hauntingly beautiful fade-out.... Set in the Crimea immediately after the Revolution, when White armies were precariously in control of the south, it is the story of Russia's filmmakers desperately trying to turn out their preposterous melodramas of private emotions while their world is collapsing around them. Having left Moscow, which they dream of with a Chekhovian intensity, they are preparing to emigrate to Paris. Reality, though, keeps intruding into this make-believe world. "Tender, sympathetic, funny and charming, the film recreates its vanished world in gorgeously Griffithian visual terms. As the shallow, self-centered movie idol who finds that love and loyalty are more complex passions than her black and white renditions on film, Elena Solovey acts with the precision and timing of a first-rate comedienne while managing to look authentically of the period."