Masquerade

Taken from a Lermentov play, Sergey Gerasimov’s Maskarad (1941) begins when beautiful Nina (Makarova) loses a bracelet during a masked ball. Another woman finds it and without revealing whose bracelet it belongs to, she is gives it to an ardent Calvary officer admirer at the ball. This leads to deeper and deeper incisions upon the urbane social body of Czarist Russia. A drama of pride, marital distrust, gambling, infidelity and humiliation twirls around the decaying corpse of a perverted social class.

• 1940s
• English subtitles
• Soviet Union