My wife and I watched this marvelous movie this evening because we will watch Russian Dolls tomorrow and the first is important to see before the second.<br /><br />We both loved The Spaniah Apartment and will enjoy following some of the characters through the early years of their lives-now in St. Pertersburg, Russia. We both identified slightly with the rough framework of the story because we were students, Florence Italy for us, so the script was not completely foreign to our early lives. Our living was considerably different but as with this movie, anytime you throw together young people passing through the same life-hoops as any developed world people they will experience much the same life situations. <br /><br />The collection of people and the personal difficulties that they faced were universals and therein lies the beauty of this film and probably its sequence that I will see tomorrow. As I wrote, the characters as well as these situations are familiar to all of us and therefore we can enjoy living their lives for awhile. This must be one of the film's great strengths-allowing the viewer to vicariously experience the emotional upheavals of the people involved and yet remain aloof. The viewer can, through that distance, chuckle to themselves thinking, "I wouldn't have done something that dumb" or "I would have avoided that trap". Maybe that's why we go to movies.