"The Tuner" is Muratova's brilliant portrayal of a sick society on the verge of complete moral collapse. Her protagonists are the little people so removed from reality that at times they seem unrealistic, invented, and their actions unmotivated. In the end, their weakness and crushing defeat by the petty con artist gives them moral power that vindicates their social marginality. Their quirkiness, their refusal to live by the rules, or, as in the last scene, to accept their own defeat even when their very survival is at stake, becomes, paradoxically, the last hope for humanity. Against the context of the Orange revolution, "The Tuner" becomes Kira Muratova's prophetic vision of the return of human dignity in her home country.

This film is based on a novel by Boris Vasiliev and takes place in a small Russian provincial town in 1940, one year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The every day life of class 9B is a larger than life portrait of Stalininism and of unconditional loyalty to party dogma.
At a birthday party a girl, one of the students, recites poetry by a "bourgeois" author. The information leaks out and her liberal father is arrested as a dissident. The daughter is faced by the class teacher and asked to publicly renounce her father which leads to a tragedy. This causes both inner and outer conflicts, the colleagues start to rebel and to question their loyalty, be it to the class teacher or the soviet ideology itself.
With political restrictions in the Soviet Union being gradually lifted in the 1980s, this was one of the first films to mention the previously taboo subject of the night time raids by the KGB, in which innocent people were dragged from their homes and jailed.

　四个知心好朋友完全摆脱了琐碎的日常生活，一同奔赴奥德萨去看俄罗斯乐队Bi-2的演唱会。四人中，斯拉瓦几乎一无所有，卡米里由于和妻子的争吵而被负罪感困扰，阿廖沙陷入了一段三角关系，而萨沙事实上生活在办公室里。观众们将有机会窥视到，这些男人不舍昼夜，甚至在睡梦中都在继续的谈话内容究竟是什么。 　　这些交谈与评论的对象包括日常生活，家庭生活，未能实现的梦想，食物，金钱，女人和艺术等等。令人欣喜的是，他们谈论这一切的方式，绝不同于流行影片中固有的庸俗腔调，而拥有善良美好的出发点。这是一部无论男人还是女人都可以用心去看的有趣又欢快的电影，其中毫无对女性的攻击或指摘，至多是有些轻松而无恶意的玩笑话罢了。

乡下姑娘纳迪娅搬到了城里，成了瓦莉亚公寓里的女佣。身为当地区委委员的 Valya 并不知道 Nadia 爱上了她目前不在身边的丈夫，一位名叫 Maksim 的地质学家。