Two Women

Plot

At the heart of the play lies a love quadrangle. Natalya Petrovna, wife of the rich landowner Arkady Sergeich Islaev, falls in love with Alexey Nikolayevich Belyaev, a student and tutor to Kolya Islaev, her son.

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Rakitin - a friend of the family, has long loved Natalya Petrovna. Verochka, Natalya Petrovna's ward, also falls in love with Kolya's tutor Alexey. Belyaev and Rakitin eventually leave the estate ...

Cast

Anna Vartanyan-Astrakhantseva (ru) as Natalya Petrovna Islaeva

Ralph Fiennes as Mikhail Aleksandrovich Rakitin

Aleksandr Baluev as Arkady Sergeich Islaev

Sylvie Testud as Elisavetta Bogdanovna

Anna Levanova as Verochka

Nikita Volkov as Alexey Nikolayevich Belyaev

Larisa Malevannaya as Anna Semenovna Islaeva

Bernd Moss as Schaaf

Sergey Yushkevich as Ignaty Shpigelsky

Vasiliy Mishchenko as Bolshentsov

Anna Nahapetova as Katya

Reception

Two Women has an approval rating of 89% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 9 reviews, and an average rating of 6.00/10. It also has a score of 54 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 4 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".

Clarence Tsui of The Hollywood Reporter wrote:

Fiennes' superficial turn (in more ways than one, as his lines ended up overdubbed by a Russian voice actor) is hampered more by circumstances than ability: rather than playing on the multiple possibilities underlining Turgenev's once-transgressive comedy of manners, actress-turned-filmmaker Vera Glagoleva's 21st century take is a po-faced, straitjacketed affair, as she (and her screenwriters Svetlana Grudovich and Olga Pogodina-Kuzima) play out the entangled relationships as excessively affected period drama. While certainly lushly mounted, Two Women is at best a piece of dated heritage cinema, and at worst cliche-ridden pomp.

Awards and nominations

The film won the Best Feature Film award at the 3rd Hanoi International Film Festival.