The Film "Долина Роз" (2011) on the Saulkrasti Seashore

Everyone needs a story or a fairy tale - young and old alike. A film about the tangles of relationships, love triangles and choices that are not so easily made, because one's current place or position is much more comfortable, secure and familiar than something new and unknown, even if longed for and desired.

The film "Долина Роз" is a Latvian-Russian co-production with actors from both countries and a universal question - why does a person choose to be happy only for a brief moment and only when completely lost in themselves? The theme is poignant, but the film's execution itself did not create that poignancy. Perhaps the Russian-mentality-characteristic bravado and loudness in the dialogues is to blame, perhaps the casting of actors for specific characters, perhaps my own subjective perception.

Be that as it may, the main charm of this film I found precisely in the choice of locations, the sea and nature vistas, and in the tavern on the seashore itself - with its wooden terrace, wind lanterns, old furniture and crockery. Everything so comforting on a cool Latvian summer August evening. In the background a wooden jetty, a fisherman's boat tied to it - also the place where, in my view, the deepest interpersonal dialogues take place.

After watching the film, there was a strong desire to find this place. In the Latvian press, apart from one dry release about the fact of filming in August 2010 on the Skulte and Saulkrasti seashore, I found nothing more. Switching the computer keyboard to Cyrillic and searching in Russian, more extensive information was found.

It turns out that for the film's purposes in the summer of 2010, a tavern and a 55-metre wooden jetty were built on the Saulkrasti seashore (does anyone know exactly where?), and two days before filming ended they were destroyed by a night storm. In other words, in real life this place does not exist at all - it remained alive only in the film and in viewers' imaginations. At least they managed without computer graphics.

The film's subtitle "...как же быстро ты живешь" perhaps most aptly characterises the contrast between the characters' pace of life and the tavern where time seems to have stood still. There people can meet as if outside their own time - celebrate and grieve, get angry and fall into thought, desire and fall in love, find and leave, enjoy. It is worth watching.