| Two Women | |
| Director: | Vera Glagoleva |
| Producer: | Natalya Ivanova |
| Screenplay: | Svetlana Grudovich Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina |
| Starring: | Anna Brenner-Vartanyan Ralph Fiennes Aleksandr Baluev |
| Music: | Sergei Banevich |
| Cinematography: | Gints Berzins |
| Editing: | Aleksandr Amirov |
| Studio: | Horosho Production House |
| Runtime: | 117 minutes |
| Country: | Russia |
| Language: | Russian |
| Budget: | € 2,860,000 |
Two Women (Dve zhenshchiny) is a 2014 Russian drama film directed by Vera Glagoleva, starring Ralph Fiennes and Sylvie Testud. It is based on Ivan Turgenev's 1872 play A Month in the Country (originally written as Two Women in 1855). The film received mixed reviews from critics.
At the heart of the play lies the love quadrangle. Natalya Petrovna, the wife of the rich landowner Arkady Sergeich Islaev, falls in love with Alexey Nikolayevich Belyaev - a student, teacher Kolya Islaeva.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Rakitin - a friend of the family, has long loved Natalya Petrovna. Verochka - a pupil of Natalya Petrovna also falls in love with Kolya's teacher. Belyaev and Rakitin eventually leave the estate ...
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.[1] It also has a score of 54 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 4 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[2]
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.[3]
The film won the Best Feature Film award at the 3rd Hanoi International Film Festival.