This 1968 Soviet feature covers well-worn territory, the drama and foibles of teachers and students at a high school. Its themes of loneliness, love, honesty and independent thinking are okay on paper, but hovering over the entire picture is the lack of freedom of expression in the Soviet Union, contradicting much of the story's message.
Main character is a history teacher who still lives with his 70-year-old mom and has failed in interpersonal relations -no love for him. Leading lady is his former student, now teaching English, who is still carrying a torch for him. The students, fellow teachers and school principal are generally stereotypes, with attempted poignancy of many a scene falling flat.
Worst scene is the climax, where teach is lecturing about the origins of the Russian Revolution, and he castigates a student for belittling a minor figure in said revolution, who the kid considers a failure because "he only received 15 lines in the textbook". Our hero's impassioned plea for recognizing the man's true worth belies all the taken-for-granted criticism of the tsars in this script: of course, no criticism of the Soviet establishment can be raised. You see, it was the tsar who promised freedom of speech and the like and didn't deliver -he's the bad guy, not any current officials.
Star Vyacheslav Tichonov looks a lot like Laurence Olivier, but I found his performance all surface and stilted -not for a moment did I empathize with him. The widescreen, black & white photography is impressive, but what occurs in the frame is a lot less interesting or informative than a random episode of James Franciscus in "Mr. Novak", which I watched loyally during this era. And considering the hard-hitting foreign films from both Western and Eastern Europe that were shown at American arthouses during this period, "Surviving Till Monday" doesn't measure up, and wasn't released in America.
