THE WEDDING
СВАДЬБА
LA NOCE



France-Russia-Germany, 2000, 114 min, color

Tanya, an attractive woman tired of playing the role of girlfriend to an older wealthy man and sick of her modeling career in Moscow, returns to Lipka, her hometown. She decides to ask a onetime schoolmate and admirer, Misha Krapivin, to marry her. He, like all the local men, works at tapped-out mine and struggles with a chronic lack of money. Though shocked by the unexpected situation, relatives and neighbors nevertheless decide to throw the young couple a proper wedding. By a stroke of luck the mine finally hands over several months' back pay to the workers. And when the wedding takes place it becomes a inexhaustible source of surprising, comic, even bizarre situations which reflect not only the rather abject misery of provincial life, but also the elemental invincibility and unfathomability of the Russian character.

"The film's central character, Mishka, is a plain, honest boy, a touch 'idiotic' in the Dostoevsky sense, for whom the idea of self-sacrifice, of giving one's all, is as natural as life itself."