Critics reviews

As a document of Moscow circa the time of de-Stalinization, I Am Twenty has a buoyant, even kaleidoscopic allure.

The defining note of the film is an itchy restlessness evident in both performance and inventive, unfettered camerawork—it was shot at least with the full cooperation of the government, and the unbounded use of Moscow as a stage is thrilling.

It should be seen by anyone who was twenty once, or is, or plans to be. Consider it a New Wave time capsule—the whispered monologues, the poetry, the 35mm, the pleasant anguish of smoking in the empty city street at 2am, not knowing what to live for or how to do it.

Compared to the languorous, simple conception of Infinitas, this 1965 film has such a level of dramatic, social, political and historical density, married to a bravura style combining the French New Wave with 1950s Hollywood social melodramas like those by Kazan, that what begins as an experience of overwhelming energy aggregates into an exhilarated but depleted, introspective exhaustion.

By the end of the movie—which makes you wonder at the obtuseness of the government that chose to censor it—Sergei is a committed patriot, arguing with those who mock the toast he drinks to potatoes. And the film's shots of Moscow at its spiffiest, including iconic scenes such as the changing of the guard at Lenin's tomb, finally transform what began as an alienated youth picture into a disturbingly affecting paean to the Soviet state.