The next segment features the boy Ignat, alone in his father’s house. Just that detail alone creates an air of sadness. Here is a boy who has been abandoned by his father, seeing him on one of those rare occasions, and he can’t even find time to be with him.

He’s in this cold, sparsely decorated place alone — or is he? An old woman appears at the kitchen table. We have no idea who she is but the scene feels spooky, sitting within a different weather system that the rest of the film. The father’s apartment has a grey-brown tint to it. It’s still beautiful like the other scenes, but now in a palate that reminds me of Restoration Hardware furniture.

The music is also spooky, something David Lynch might use in “Twin Peaks.” In fact, the whole scene could be dropped randomly into Twin Peaks: The Return and it would fit just fine.

The old woman, sternly but softly, asks Ignat to find a notebook on the third bookshelf and read from it. Ignat begins to read a line about Rousseau, but the woman implores him to not waste time and just read the underlined section.

It’s a quote from a Pushkin letter in the 1830s. It involves Russia’s role in saving Christianity from the Mongol invaders and how this gave the Russian people a unique role in history. The quote sounds like something Putin might use today to hype Russian exceptionalism.

The woman does not comment on the quote, she just asks Ignat to get the door, even though we have not heard a knock. Ignat once again dutifully complies. When he gets to the door, it’s another elderly woman, one who says she has the wrong house, apologizes and moves on.

When Ignat gets back inside, the older woman is gone. But on the table where she was drinking tea, a circle of condensation remains, evidence that she was once there. It slowly evaporates.

Then the phone rings. Ignat picks up and it is his father, who tells him to find a way to stay busy, presumably because he won’t be home soon. I imagine him running into a woman on the way home and deciding to spend time with her instead.

He asks Ignat if he has any friends he could invite over, which is a particularly obnoxious request — how likely is it that he has friends near a place where he spends so little time? Her, Alexi launches into a boast that he had a girlfriend “already” when he was Ignat’s age, a girl with “red, red hair” and chapped lips.

This will serve as a transition into the past and a vivid scene about the father’s memories during World War II. But I’ll leave that for the next piece.

What this segment leaves me with is thick atmosphere, an apartment that feels cold and mysterious and a dutiful, complying son forced to make it feel like home. And I take away some sadness, because I too did not see my father for long stretches while growing up and feel for Ignat, who is perhaps inventing female authority figures just to give himself security that is so elusive.