Ruthless Romance

A provincial town on the Volga. Larisa is beautiful but has no dowry, and her mother is trying to save her through a good marriage. The man she loves, the wealthy shipowner Paratov, disappears one day. The only suitor left is Karandyshev, a minor clerk, and she accepts him without loving him. Then Paratov comes back. Eldar Ryazanov directs, from Alexander Ostrovsky's 1878 play Without a Dowry. Larisa Guzeyeva plays Larisa in her first film, and the part made her known overnight. Nikita Mikhalkov plays Paratov and Andrei Myagkov plays Karandyshev. Money is at the centre. The play looks like a love triangle, but the actual subject is that Larisa is treated as a thing to be bought and sold; the men gamble over her and the film shows it plainly. The music is the most remembered part. Andrei Petrov's songs became very popular in the Soviet Union, and the lyrics of the one Mikhalkov sings, about a shaggy bumblebee, come from a poem by Rudyard Kipling. It was shot on real Volga steamers and on the river, which is why it does not have the closed air of most stage adaptations. Who it is for: viewers who like Russian literary adaptation and Ryazanov's cinema. Who it is not for: the melodrama runs high, it is long, and the weight of the source text keeps some scenes on the stage.