In Moscow Timofei Pechorin (Evgenii Koriakovskii), a talented and upwardly mobile creator of advertising campaigns, begins a romance with Vera Kirillova (Lyubov Tolkalina), a TV news anchor with celebrity status. Their personal and professional successes are shown in the film with an artificial glossiness that suggests their happiness may be defined by their media work. Before they have time to work out their relationship, Timofei's well-ordered world is thrown into turmoil by the sudden arrival of the young Kalmyk Uloomji (Damir Badmaev), who falls on Timofei's moving car and is slightly injured. Timofei is forced to take in the unregistered migrant to avoid complications with the police. In a remarkably short time, the Asian youth uses his mysterious and mystical Eastern power to seduce his host, thus setting up an uncomfortable but inevitable ménage a trois. Vera struggles to comprehend their bond and her boyfriend's erratic behavior. She is dragged reluctantly into a bizarre love triangle. Before long, all three lives unravel, with a visit to a Buddhist healer, a three-way in the bathroom of a gay bar, a faked death, and a kidnapping.
"Ya lyublyu tebya" was more than five years in the making. It's a fable about an unusual love triangle, sweet, luscious, charming, delightful, and almost-psychedelic. The film is structured as a hodgepodge of contrasts and themes that do not seem to form any coherent artistic whole. It becomes more far-fetched with each twist of romantic fate. The artificiality of contemporary life in Moscow is juxtaposed with the more natural lifestyle of Uloomji, who seems to have a spiritual bond with the animal kingdom but can make no sense of an ATM machine. Particularly funny are two cabbies' sly references to "you know who," a certain someone high up in the government purported to be secretly gay. Overall, the film is well acted, has a good fast and choppy story, and is sometimes deliberately cheesy. Richardas Norvila composed the music score. Olga Stolpovskaja, Alisa Tanskaya, and Dmitry Troitsky wrote the screenplay. Olga Stolpovskaja and Dmitry Troitsky directed. In Russian with English subtitles. The English title is "You I Love".
