We all yearn to improve ourselves – but change starts within, and it can only be accomplished through small but significant steps to making a difference in our own lives. Some of these changes are exceptionally easy, others take time and effort, and in both cases, the rate of success is not always consistent, and ultimately depends on the individual and their approach to bettering themselves through looking inwards. In the case of The Most Charming and Attractive (Russian: Самая обаятельная и привлекательная), we have a delightfully irreverent story of a middle-aged woman named Nadya Klyueva, who leads a pleasant but lonely life – she is unmarried, has very few friends and is mostly ignored by her colleagues, despite her very sweet demeanour and ferocious intelligence. However, when she comes across an old friend who is now a celebrated sociologist, she is put through a series of rigorous tests and courses, in an effort to teach her the best techniques to charm the opposite sex, leading to a series of hilarious scenarios in which our heroine discovers more about herself than anything else. A very sweet film that finds writer Anatoly Eiramdzhan and director Gerald Bezhanov delivering one of their many delightful comedies that are extremely charming but have a firm, solid foundation on which the narrative is built, The Most Charming and Attractive is very effective, being a wonderfully eccentric confection of a film that never takes itself too seriously, but instead offers us nothing more than an upbeat, joyful celebration of individuality and identity, which may not be particularly revolutionary, but has enough heart and soul to justify some of its more obvious narrative decisions throughout.

The act of self-improvement is universal – we all have the desire to be the best possible version of ourselves, but the journey to get there is not aways particularly pleasant. We do find that the best works are often those which offer us something we haven’t seen before, but a film like The Most Charming and Attractive does tend to be at its best when its ideas are easily recognisable and somewhat obvious, since it leaves no room for ambiguity, and instead allows us to foster a more poignant and captivating perspective in the process. There are so many very charming elements that drive this film and made it a delightfully offbeat examination of one woman’s journey to improving herself in order to attract a partner, only to discover that her supposed flaws were defining features, and instead of needing to change, she benefits from learning to love herself and appreciate her inherent traits, since these are the elements that have allowed those people who genuinely enjoy her company (of which there are quite a few, even if she doesn’t realise this) to appreciate her, resisting her attempts to change into someone she was never meant to be in the first place. It’s very much a film that is relevant to the contemporary era, and despite being made over forty years ago, The Most Charming and Attractive is surprisingly current, with the themes of self-love, acceptance and embracing your identity being a remarkably modern concept that goes against the more prominent belief in seeking perfection and erasing all bespoke traits, regardless of the cost. It’s very effective approach, and whatever impelled them to craft this story, and essentially go against one of the more common (and ultimately inaccurate) pieces of social conversation remains to be seen – the film itself is a delight, and never fails to surprise and entertain, even at its most obvious and unintentionally conventional.

There is a lot more to The Most Charming and Attractive than just the act of changing yourself to fit better into society, and the dangers that come with such a mentality. Ultimately, this film aims to be a very gentle, heartfelt examination of society at a very particular time in history. It was made when the Soviet Union was standing on its final legs – it would only be a few years until the collapse of the union, and it is certainly very difficult to detach the fact that it was heading towards a new era from this film, even if it is decidedly not at all political in its commentary. The core of The Most Charming and Attractive is to examine how change is inevitable, but it does not need to be defining – whether or not this was the intention of the director to craft a film that has unexpected insights into the social structure remains to be seen, but its certainly not a comparison that is without merit, since there are some moments here that do feel heavily steeped in social and cultural commentary. However, this is quite a simple, uninspired point of discussion – immediately trying to find correlations between a Soviet era comedy and its broader political and cultural insinuations is dreadfully reductive, since it assumes that a work cannot exist independence of its ideas. Even if we don’t want to latch onto the already tenuous correlations between this film and its underlying ideas, The Most Charming and Attractive is still a delightfully irreverent, heartfelt comedy about culture – the observations the director makes about daily life in a big city are adorable, and we find that there are many elements that grab our attention. It’s not a persuasive text, but rather one that intends to be quite gentle and descriptive, veering towards a slice-of-life comedy more than anything else, and essentially being a very compelling comedy about ordinary people going about their lives, and finding value in every moment.

The weight of The Most Charming and Attractive and its small but lovely ideas ultimately falls onto the shoulders of Irina Muravyova, who portrays the lovable protagonist, a woman who is desperately seeking a sense of belonging but feels like she is perpetually on the outskirts of society, not realising that she is loved and appreciated, just not in the ways that many would anticipate. There’s something really lovely about how this film handles this character and treats her as more than just a one-dimensional “ugly duckling” searching for affection, and a lot of this credit has to go to Muravyova, whose performance is heartfelt and gentle, but also simmering with a kind of feistiness that we don’t often come across in a lot of circumstances. There’s something very charming about this performance, and she delivers a poignant, heartbreakingly meaningful portrayal of a woman who has been told so many times that she is not wanted, that she’s started to believe it herself. It’s a masterful attempt at intricate, well-defined character work, and one of the many terrific performances that anchor The Most Charming and Attractive and make it so wholeheartedly delightful. Supporting performances from Aleksandr Abdulov as the object of the protagonist’s affection, Tatyana Vasileva as her former friend who acts as her coach before making it clear that she is just as unaware of how life truly works, and Lyudmila Ivanova as the protagonist’s employer and close friend, are all uniformly terrific, and bring such a unique, captivating energy to a film that was built squarely on the exceptional work being done by its actors, all of whom entirely understand the subtle cues that drive this narrative.

While it is very easy to view The Most Charming and Attractive as nothing more than a handsomely-made, heartfelt comedy in the vein of Pygmalion, there is slightly more to this film than meets the eye, and everyone involved is wholeheartedly committed to this wacky but delightful premise, which is in turn thoroughly elevated by their tremendous work. It’s not an overly complex film, and we can appreciate its honesty, since it is open about its limitations, and chooses to build on the qualities that it knows it can handle, rather than taking swings too bold to be entirely effective. It’s lovable and earnest, and always captures our attention – how else do we explain some of its more hilarious moments coming from the mere act of seeing two characters interacting, the humour emerging from either their differences in opinion, the act of misunderstanding one another, or simply finding some unexpected source of amusement in the subtlest of interactions. It’s neither bold nor bombastic, but it never aims to be – instead, it functions as a lighthearted, outrageously funny romp through Russian society in the 1980s, a period where the country was undergoing a lot of changes, some of which are briefly discussed, but where the majority of this film is meant to be more subtle and intimate, rather than being a series of grandiose statements that ultimately don’t lead to anything particularly notable. Hilarious and irreverent in some moments, heartwrenchingly sweet in others, The Most Charming and Attractive is a lovely film, and more than earns our respect and admiration through its firm commitment to being itself.