Much like Boris Barnet’s The House on Trubnaya Square, Room’s Bed and Sofa is a film about the here and now. Its original Russian title, The Third Meshchanskaia, is the name of a real, perfectly unremarkable street in Moscow upon which the miserable apartment—where all of the film’s action takes place—lies. Volodia, a young, solitary printer, lands a job in Moscow and is looking for a place to stay. Finding no vacancies in hotels, he looks up construction worker Kolia, his Civil War comrade from eight years before. Even though Kolia lives in a small one-room apartment, he offers his former trench buddy a sofa—the bed being occupied by Kolia himself and his wife Liuda. Set up as a farce (hence its salty American distribution title), Bed and Sofa soon turns into a drama of divided loyalties and ends as a movie about a woman’s freedom to choose. The great formalist Viktor Shklovsky, who wrote the script, seems to ask what family life should look like in the supposedly post-bourgeois communal society of Soviet Russia. As you will see in the end, he, like many others, struggles with the answer.

Live Musical Accompaniment by Bertrand and Susan Laurence