Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.

A young Surrealist artist arrives in Leningrad to enter the Academy of Arts. In search of like-minded people, he goes around the city, gets to know his inhabitants and meets Alevtina, a girl who has already entered the bohemian environment...

The author's interpretation of the story by F. M. Dostoevsky "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" using motifs from the stories by T. Mann "The Clown" and Leo Tolstoy "Notes of a Madman".