Moscow is not Paris, it is not the city of love, on the contrary it seems to be depicted as a city where no one interacts with one another, and no one falls in love anymore. This is quite surprising considering the fact that you would assume under a communist regime, where the group and community is prioritized, members of the community would mingle more and meet one another. The opposite, according to the film and animated short, however, has occurred. What I find extraordinary about the Moscow presented in the film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, is the place of women in society. There is this newfound upward mobility where women are breaking out of their traditional role as in the domestic spheres, and instead are found everywhere in public. Women are the ones taking advantage of what the city has to offer in terms of amusement, culture, as well as oppurtunity. It comes to a point where women can have a higher ranking in society than man and earn more money. This feminine independence was first seen in Cement, and the same problem remains: men aren’t man enough to handle this shifting society. This however is not the only problem presented in the film concerning men however, it is also challenging to find a decent bachelor. Men are single because they are not being industrious or ambitious, instead they are drinking themselves away and shunning the public sphere, men are failing where women are thriving. And this is a phenomenon left unexplained by the movie, what is happening to the Russian men?

What I found really intriguing was the film’s dialectic concerning the woman role in this new society. The main dilemma being this: the film presents this main character, Katarina, a single mother (because men are dumb and irresponsable), who goes above and beyond, and has achieved a decently high rank in society, raking in a respectable income, that, by the end of the movie, settles with this man that has a old-fashioned and traditional outlook of women and their role in society (who hasn’t achieved half as much as Katarina). If this was Cement, she would never have settled. It was frustrating and not satisfying to what Katarina, who has endured so many hardships to prove her worth, to conform to this patriarchal hierarchy that places her in a traditional gender role that does not leave the domestic space. How can we reconcile these two opposing ideas? Especially when the ending is presented as a happy one, where Georg is the man she has been looking for? Does this undo all the previous narrative, that I perceived as having a certain feminist agenda? Is this movie trying to say that women need husbands to fully find their place in society and are incomplete without him, even if he’s not as accomplished?