A Black Rose Is an Emblem of Sorrow, a Red Rose an Emblem of Love (1990)

A Black Rose Is an Emblem of Sorrow, a Red Rose an Emblem of Love feels like stumbling into a fever-dream cabaret staged in a Moscow apartment building—part fairy tale, part street comedy, part aching love letter to a world wobbling on its hinges. Set around the Old Arbat’s swirl of vendors and young artists, it turns everyday Soviet gray into something mischievous and luminous, where eccentric neighbors and sudden bursts of unreality capture the era’s chaos better than any straight drama could. The film’s charm is in its beautifully absurd rhythm: it’s hilarious, strange, and oddly tender, with images and moments that stick like songs you can’t stop humming. If you need tidy plot mechanics and realism, it may test your patience—but if you’re open to playful, surreal cinema that finds romance and melancholy in the same breath, it’s a one-of-a-kind experience worth taking.

This film is clearly aiming for a whimsical, semi-magical portrait of late-Soviet Moscow, using the Old Arbat’s street life and an eccentric apartment house as a little universe of artists, hustlers, and dreamers. The problem is it often plays more like a grab bag of sketches than a story, with the tone sliding into broad farce and the “surreal society” idea feeling clumsy rather than illuminating. If you need a coherent plot, emotional throughline, or even comedy that builds to something, this may feel vague, tired, and self-impressed. But if you’re patient with loose, theatrical chaos and you’re mainly there for atmosphere and oddball characters, you might still find moments of charm in its off-kilter Moscow mood.