The best Aleksey Petrenko’s romance movies

Douglas is a foreign entrepreneur, who ventures to Russia in 1885 with dreams of selling a new, experimental steam-driven timber harvester in the wilds of Siberia. Jane is his assistant. On her travels, she meets two men who would change her life forever: a handsome young cadet Andrej Tolstoy with whom she shares a fondness for opera, and the powerful General Radlov who is entranced by her beauty and wants to marry her.

The film is based on the play by Alexander Ostrovsky “Without a Dowry”. The action takes place on the banks of the Volga in the fictional provincial town of Bryakhimov in 1877-1878. Harita Ignatyevna Ogudalova, a noblewoman of a good and respected family, a widow with three adult daughters, became impoverished after her husband’s death, but she does everything to arrange her daughters' life and marry them to sufficiently rich and noble grooms. In the absence of funds, she keeps an open house, hoping that a society of beautiful and musical young ladies will attract single men rich enough to marry loveless women. Kharita’s only “at a loose end” daughter is the youngest - Larisa Dmitrievna Ogudalova, who is not indifferent to several wealthy gentlemen at once, among whom Sergey Sergeyevich Paratov is a handsome, charming, smarty, frivolous and rich gentleman.