Frunze Dovlatyan’s breezy, strange and intriguing 1966 drama gets a deserved rerelease
This intriguing and mysterious romantic drama from 1966 is directed by Armenian film-maker Frunze Dovlatyan; it was entered into competition at Cannes that year and is now rereleased. Hello, It’s Me! often has that kind of freewheeling breeziness that you might associate with the 60s; at other times, I found myself thinking of Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman.
The distinguished Armenian stage and screen
Actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan plays a fictional young scientist called Artyom, based on the real-life figure of Artem Alikhanian, who during the second world war became one of the pioneers of Soviet nuclear physics. (He shares this distinction, incidentally, with the great Soviet scientist Lev Landau, whose life story was the unlikely inspiration for Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s epic movie installation project Dau.)