Autumn Marathon (1979) poster
1979 · tragicomedy · midlife · drama

Autumn Marathon

Directed by Georgiy Daneliya1h 29m1979
ElsewhereIMDb7.84kTMDB7.168
  • intimate
Movie DNA

Neutral, steady, measured tragicomedy / midlife, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

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Andrey Pavlovich Buzykin, who makes a living by teaching at an institute and translating English literature, is cheating on his wife. Buzykin's main problem is that he's a kind man with a weak character. The lies he is telling his wife all the time are inconvincing, but he never has the courage to tell her the truth. His lover, Alla, is aware of his family life, but gets offended when, for example, he cannot meet her so that he doesn't come home late, or when he doesn't want to go home in a new jacket she gives him to avoid having to explain to his wife. Alla and Nina, Andrei's wife, both leave him, forgive him, and return to him at the same time, and Andrei continues with this kind of life, full of suffering and deceit. Finally, both women are so fed up with his lies that they don't believe him even when he is telling the truth...

Our read · Autumn Marathon (1979) reads as a neutral, steady, grounded tragicomedy · midlife · drama entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

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The shape of Autumn Marathon

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a gentle Soviet comedy about a weak kind man's romantic mess.

ends bittersweetit stays with yousteady all the waygrips by minute 12attention 3/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around

Skip it tonightSkip if stories of chronic lying and indecision feel too cringey.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
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