Oci ciornie

This Russian-Italian co-production from 1987 finds two older men, one Italian, the other Russian, talking in the empty dining hall of a slow ocean liner. The Italian tells his story in flashback, as we see him fight with his rich wife, which sends him to a health spa to recuperate, where he meets a bored, young and beautiful Russian woman who is herself unhappily married. After many overtures toward a romance, the Russian wife flees back home, and the Italian follows her, ostensibly on business, but truly in hopes of sparking the romance further.

The film is gorgeously photographed, and much attention is paid to costume and set design, as well as delicate color schemes. Marcello Mastroianni received his final of three Best Actor Oscar nominations for this, and he's wonderful as usual. Silvano Mangano plays his wife, and Marthe Keller appears as a family friend. I wasn't familiar with the Russian leads, Elena Safonova and Vsevolod Larionov, but they are fine as well. The story drags a bit in places, and lengthy passages of Russian without subtitles started to detract after a while (I'm not sure if this was the fault of the print I watched, or if it was intentional, to show the language barrier faced by Mastroianni's character).