Somewhere near the beginning of The Stroll two of its characters walk past a poster advertising 8 femmes (2002), a film by François Ozon in which no-one is quite what they appear to be. This poster is only glimpsed for a moment, but for those who catch it, it presages what is to come. In broadest terms, The Stroll deals with the themes of appearance and reality. I sometimes wonder if Russian filmmakers are frustrated philosophers, in any case, dialectical oppositions are never far from their hearts. Director Alexey Uchitel constellates his own dialectical interests around a rather unusual ménage-à-trois that develops over the course of one afternoon between best friends Alyosha (Pavel Barshak) and Petya, (Yevgeny Tsyganov) and Olya (Irina Pegova), a girl they happen to meet while strolling the streets of St. Petersburg. Uchitel explores love as a possibility that oscillates between appearance and reality, falsehood and truth, outer shell and inner content, hollowness and fullness, secrets and revelations. As Alyosha and Petya walk and talk with Olya, they appear to fall in and out of love with mercuric rapidity: fifteen minutes after they have met, Alyosha begs Olya to marry him. We might at first be inclined to take this sudden profession of deep abiding love as an eccentricity of Alyosha’s psychology. But when Petya begins to press his friend to ignore his feelings for Olya on the basis that he himself is convinced that she is his true soul-mate, we begin to suspect that these expressions of love are more appearance than reality. It’s not that Alyosha and Petya’s sentiments of love aren’t actually felt, or that Olya doesn’t seem to genuinely return them, but that Uchitel’s examination wishes to show that this ‘love’ conceals a hollowness and wishes to highlight his characters’ inability to understand their own feelings towards another person. This hollowness and lack of awareness is echoed in the film’s structure: just as these characters stroll through St. Petersburg going nowhere, so too their relationships wander around aimlessly but ultimately go nowhere.

Conversations in The Stroll tick along like clockwork. Each clever remark is answered by an equally witty response, and the intended cumulative effect is reliant upon the quickness with which replies bounce back and forth. Although these exchanges are spoken they are, by nature, the kind of dialogue which would sound better if read. (It’s true that this film is spoken in Russian, with most non-Russian viewers reading the subtitles, but the reading of subtitles is unlike the act of reading a book -- subtitles are always contextualized and linked to the performance of actors and to the speech rhythms they set in motion.) In his essay, Literature and Post-History, George Steiner discusses the shift that has occurred in reading practice from the time of Victorian England where it was customary to read novels out loud, with one family member reading to and for the others, to the present-day in which the act of reading a novel is essentially a private and silent one. Whereas the Victorian style was, "directed towards recitation, the mimesis of the raised voice and the response of the ear", today’s novels are directed to a reader who can dictate his or her own pace and who can pause at any point to fully grasp implications and complex nuances without loosing anything of a dialogue’s sharpness. I have made the detour into the difference between the literary and the conversational word because The Stroll’s dialogue has markedly literary rhythms which, in the context of performance and speech, tend to create an effect where everything seems to happen too fast, and where it is difficult not to feel that the actors are reciting written lines, rather than responding to what has just been said to them.

Appropriately for a work which seems to be woven from highly literary and philosophical threads, the endpoint to which the film’s narrative strolling ambles, and the note on which it chooses to close is a paradoxical one: you can only realize what you love once you have lost it, and you can only understand the meaning of ‘love’ once it is has slipped form your reach. Another dialectical tangle: the presence of love is forever bound up with its absence.