This drama, based oh-so-loosely on the Princess Mary section of Lermontov's Hero Of Our Time, is a good watch and expertly made.
Yes, it is screamingly bouregois, which is a bit of problem. It does become very easy to laugh at the 'action', to believe that the characters who apper to not actually do anything start heaving their bodices. Everything is incredibly Fine, is incredibly Delicate, is incredibly Sensitive. It's all rather Proustian, and very much a drawing room drame of intellectuals (set in the post Drawing room age). The language is rather stylisised; but this is down to the obvious influence of Chekhov. It shares his not-classically-naturalist bent of high-falluting conversations about the meaning of life over tea and biscuits (I refer more to his plays than his stories) . Chekhov is a God, and this film does not of course approach his genius, but in between some rather painful stylisations it just about works.
The falling in love part, in the middle of the movie, is rather jarringly and unconvincingly portrayed. This may be deliberate, to show its rather surreal manner, and the power of one character's capacity to extrapolte beyond what is there. The end, despite a few moments we were worried, happily does not chicken out and we are left with a satisfying, if at time unintentionally hillarious, relish.
This is an incredibly bourgeois (Proust's world updated to the 1990's)anti-romance of manners. It suffers from the pitfalls of that label, but is at once well made and rather satisfyingly plotted. Worth a look, and a little more.
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