A Nest of Gentry

The Russian nobleman Fyodor Ivanovich Lavretsky returns to his estate after years in Paris. There he falls in love with his young cousin Liza, and this complicates a marriage already in trouble. What comes of it is a tragic and emotionally tangled story. The film was adapted from a novel and builds the provincial nobility of nineteenth century Russia in detail. The account condemns nobody; it shows everyone caught inside their own upbringing and position. The estate, the garden and long silences set the film’s rhythm. The impossibility of the love comes not from an obstacle but from an order. Leonid Kulagin and Irina Kupchenko appear in Andrei Konchalovsky’s hundred and eleven minute Soviet film, completed in 1969.