| The Star of Captivating Happiness | |
| Director: | Vladimir Motyl |
| Starring: | Igor Kostolevsky Irina Kupchenko Aleksey Batalov Natalya Bondarchuk Oleg Strizhenov |
| Music: | Isaak Schwarz |
| Cinematography: | Dmitriy Meshiev |
| Editing: | Ye. Sadovskaya |
| Studio: | Lenfilm |
| Runtime: | 167 min. |
| Country: | Soviet Union |
| Language: | Russian |
The Star of Captivating Happiness (Russian: «Звезда пленительного счастья»|Zvezda plenitelnogo schastya) is a 1975 Soviet historical romance.[1] The title is an allusion to a line from the poem To Chaadayev by Alexander Pushkin.[2] It is a drama with the dedication "to the women of Russia".
The story is set in the aftermath of the Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. The revolt is suppressed, the investigation proceeds, five Decembrists are executed. Other involved military officers are sentenced to exile in Siberia and (Dekabristki) face the decision as to whether or not to follow them.
After making the 1970 hit film White Sun of the Desert, Motyl received no directorial projects for five years.
When Motyl got the green light from Goskino to make a film about the Decembrists, he still had problems and had to do many rewrites because the authorities believed that the picture had too many parallels to the Soviet regime and allusions about Soviet dissidents.
Nevertheless, the screenplay was rejected. Then Motyl went to Leningrad, to the regional party committee. He handed the script to the secretary on ideology; the woman did not have time to read it and instead gave the text to her daughter who ended up adoring it. The mother called, Soviet Minister of Cinematography and declared that "The Leningrad Regional Committee is interested in the film about the Decembrists!" Thus the script got to Lenfilm, but the budget was cut to 1.5 million rubles from the initial 3.5 million.[3] [4]
The locations of the film included the Peterhof Palace and the Winter Palace.[5]