"Lopatine, a noted writer and war correspondent, gets a brief furlough after the Battle of Stalingrad. During his week-long train journey home, he encounters a cuckolded soldier, a woman in tears; he watches, listens, dreams. Arriving in Tashkent, he visits his ex-wife, and witnesses the shooting of a film based on his work: its bombastic posturing seems to travesty the sense he'd tried to convey of war as muddy, cold, filled with fear. He meets the tearful woman he'd glimpsed on the train. They share a brief idyll, all the more moving for its restraint. Profoundly anti-war, though it doesn't depict a single battle, Gherman's second film was shelved for nearly a decade. Stunningly photographed, like Trial on the Road (PFA 10/86), in black-and-white 'Scope, Twenty Days is an even more marked break with Soviet cinema's traditionally edifying stories and manichean themes. Yuri Nikouline, a famed circus clown, and Ludmilla Gurchenko give extraordinary performances as the anguished, uncertain lovers." Peter Scarlet