The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed

The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed
DVD cover
Directed by	Stanislav Govorukhin
Written by	Vayner brothers (novel & screenplay)
Starring	Vladimir Vysotsky Vladimir Konkin Zinovy Gerdt Armen Dzhigarkhanyan
Cinematography	Leonid Burlaka
Edited by	Valentina Olejnik
Music by	Yevgeni Gevorgyan
Production company	Odessa Film Studio
Release date	1979
Running time	359 minutes
Country	Soviet Union
Language	Russian

The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Russian: Место встречи изменить нельзя, [Mesto vstrechi izmenit nelzya] Error: {{Transliteration}}: missing language / script code (help)) is a 1979 Soviet 5-part television miniseries directed by Stanislav Govorukhin. It achieved the status of a cult film in the USSR, and along with Seventeen Moments of Spring it became a part of popular culture with several generations of russophone TV viewers. The series star the famed singer-songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky in one of his final screen appearances (his death at the age of 42 came less than a year after the film's release). Soviet screen and stage legends Sergey Yursky, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Zinovy Gerdt, Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev and Leonid Kuravlev also appear in the film.

The film was released in the West as The Age of Mercy, the title of the novel by the writing duo of brothers Arkadiy Vayner and Georgiy Vayner, on which the film was based.

Plot

The film is set in post-WWII Moscow. Vladimir Sharapov (Vladimir Konkin) is a young reconnaissance officer who has just returned from the war and is assigned for peacetime duty at the famous MUR (Moscow Department of Criminal Investigations). There he becomes part of an elite team led by the brilliant, tough, no-nonsense homicide detective Gleb Zheglov (Vysotsky). The duo becomes embroiled in two seemingly separate investigations: that of the murder of young aspiring actress Larisa Gruzdeva, and the hunt for a vicious gang of armed robbers that calls itself "Black Cat" and constantly manages to evade capture. While suspicion in Gruzdeva's murder initially falls on her estranged husband Dr Gruzdev (Yursky), it gradually becomes apparent that the two cases are connected, as a Black Cat mobster known as Fox is implicated in the murder. As a result of Zheglov's successful high-stakes operation to capture Fox, Sharapov inadvertently finds himself undercover at the Black Cat hideout, sparring with the gang's menacing leader The Hunchback (Dzhigarkhanyan). What ensues is arguably one of Soviet television's most memorable and suspenseful finales.

Much of the series revolves around the relationship between Zheglov and Sharapov. While the two become close friends and roommates, they also clash throughout the film. The source of the conflict is Sharapov's disagreement with Zheglov's "ends justify the means" approach to law enforcement. Zheglov thinks that "a thief's place is in prison, and the public couldn't care less how I put him there". To that end, Zheglov thinks nothing of using dubious tactics such as planting evidence to justify the arrest of a known pickpocket. Sharapov, on the other hand, considers that law is a higher value for its own sake and cannot be used merely as a tool. A tense conflict also arises when, in order to mislead Fox, Zheglov elects to continue to hold Dr Gruzdev under arrest even after it becomes clear that the man is innocent.

Other information

• The film's title is a reference to the finale, where Sharapov's botched attempt to get away after making contact with the gang forces Zheglov to follow a previously discarded plan for an undercover operation. Hoping that Sharapov will lure the bandits to the scene of a prior robbery as they have previously rehearsed, Zheglov utters: "The place and time of the operation cannot be changed."
• Actors Sergey Yursky, Zinovy Gerdt, Yevgeniy Yevstigneyev and Leonid Kuravlev star in the series. Years earlier, all four appeared together in the smash hit comedy The Golden Calf based on the novel by Ilf and Petrov, with Yursky leading the cast as the venerable con artist Ostap Bender.
• The series were originally intended to have 7 parts, but the Soviet broadcast authorities ordered to trim them down to 5. As a result, many scenes were left out of the final cut, with creators struggling to maintain the flow of the narrative
• According to Vysotsky played a major creative role in the making of the series. He conceived the idea of turning the novel into a movie after receiving an advance copy of the book from the Vayner brothers, and he actively campaigned for the part of Zheglov despite the fact that the character in the novel was a much younger man. During the making of the film, he frequently substituted for Govorukhin as director, including directing the entire scene of Dr Gruzdev's interrogation, and he also invented the comical attributes of the character of Kostya "The Brick" Saprykin (a good-natured thief with a speech impediment).
• Sharapov's love interest patrolwoman Varya Sinichkina dies at the end of the novel. The ending was altered in the movie because the studio administrator thought it was too depressing. The Vayner brothers later admitted that they liked the new happy ending better.

In popular culture

• The popular song "Atas" by the Russian group Lyubeh is based on the characters of the film.
• A sculpture of Zheglov and Sharapov (picture) is installed outside the Internal Affairs Ministry building in Kiev, Ukraine
• Armen Dzhigarkhanyan lampooned his own performance as The Hunchback in a 1998 installment of a popular Armenian sketch comedy series Our Backyard.
• In 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin used Zheglov's famous "a thief's place is in prison" line in widely criticized remarks against the jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

External links

• The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed at AllMovie
• The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed at IMDb