This is another Russian movie, based on a 1840's play The Dowerless Girl by Ostrovsky. I am told that this film is very close in detail to the play but completely different in spirit. I think it was a very popular film in Russia. This film is very beautiful with its stellar cast, real characters, catchy gypsy melodies, and subtle cinematography. This film is not for everyone, except perhaps if you are the type who finds depressing 19th century soap operas cathartic or just enjoy a good cry.
The story revolves around an upper-class girl with no money trying to find a suitor during a tumultuous time period seeing the end of serfdom, rising middle class, and downfall of nobility.
This story is the type of "novel without a hero" drama, with suitors who are either are suave, petty, disgusting, pitiful, or a little of each. All of the characters are human, to some degree sympathize-able, and no character is a sacrificial lamb or cardboard-cutout. Overall, the cast and screenplay are impressive, not because they convince you so well that they are from a different time, but because they convince you that there is no such thing--that it is your own.
What amazed me most was how the film transformed a sorrowful tale of political and social upheaval into a universal tale about people's inability in search for eternal, unconditional human love---particularly about woman's innate and irrational desire for eternal, unconditional, and fulfilling love, often thought to be found in men or marriage.
It is odd how so many girls think that they can prove their mothers wrong, or are even encouraged by their mothers to think that their mothers' situation is exceptional or amendable.
Their mothers' situations are not exceptional, nor amendable, because their problem is not from situation--it is from within. We are our mothers. We are Eve. And our desire shall be for our husband, and he shall rule over us.
No, fulfillment cannot come from humanity, from human love, from humanistic ideals or idealistic humanism.
Idealistic humanism is ultimately idolatrous, because it is searching for fulfillment within. I think it is sad that what Hollywood pretends and promotes is also what many Christians in America seem to buy, sell, and worship. But what you make or buy cannot eternally satisfy, for they are only dead images carved by men; they have ears but cannot hear, mouths, but cannot speak.
For some reason it seems that true idealism, or belief in the beautiful unseen, only works when there is faith in the beautiful, everlasting, all-powerful, just, self-sustaining, and unseen purpose. Somehow, finding purpose in present life or mankind is futile, yet so many have succeeded only when they did not believe and rely on the present, but on the eternal.
When man searches within, he is empty. When man searches without, he is full.
"Let nothing disturb thee; Let nothing dismay thee; All thing pass; G-d never changes.
Patience attains All that it strives for. He who has G-d finds he lacks nothing: G-d alone suffices." --st. Theresa of Avila
