When Assol was a little girl, she met a wizard who foretold that it will be a fine sunny day when a beautiful ship under scarlet sail would arrive and the noble prince would take her away to the world of her dreams where she will be loved and happy. The neighbours joked about her, children teased her, but Assol chose to believe in miracles and wait for her prince.

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.