Most of the action occurs in the Psychoanalyst's office, a spacious, well lighted room. He, sits on a wooden straight backed chair mostly immobile while in front of him his patients sit, lounge or lie down on a comfortable looking couch. We are witnesses to his conversations with various patients: The Flight Attendant, an attractive young woman dressed in red and worried about taking care of her ineffective brother, the Traffic Cop, the Film Director, the Lift Operator, the Trapeze Artist (whom he offends by calling hher "a circus woman"). There is a slight air of unreality in some of these scenes; we never see patients leaving or entering the room and some of them seem to be out of place or know more about The Psychoanalyst that one would expect.
We, the viewers, get tantalizing hints about the various strangers, perhaps incomplete or unreliable. All through these encounters. The Psychoanalyst manages to keep a distance between his feelings and those of his patients, sometimes in a rather brusque and ofputting way. That, however collapses with the last patient of the day that we also see at the beginning in flashforward. Here, the separation between professional and personal becomes impossible, and tragedy ensues. We then realize that the whole movie can be seen from a different point of view prom the beginning.
This film is one of those that you like the better the more you think about it post projection. If was filmed in the Ukraine, with Ukrainian actors but spoken in Russian. Acting and cinematography are first rate and director Anar Azimov does an excellent job of introducing deft touches of unreality in an otherwise straightforward tale.
