Tanya, an attractive woman tired of playing the role of girlfriend to an older wealthy man and sick of her modelling career in Moscow, returns to Lipka, her hometown. And maybe it’s not just caprice that leads her to ask a onetime schoolmate and admirer, Misha Krapivin, to marry her. He, like all the local men, works at a tapped-out mine and struggles with a chronic lack of money. Though shocked by the unexpected situation, relatives and neighbours nevertheless decide to throw the young couple a proper wedding. By a stroke of luck the mine finally hands over several months’ back pay to the workers. And when the wedding takes place it becomes a inexhaustible source of surprising, comic, even bizarre situations which reflect not only the rather abject misery of provincial life, but also the elemental invincibility and unfathomability of the Russian character. Inhabitants of the mining town of Lipka (near Tula) filled in as extras and were a significant reason why the actors together won the Best Acting Company Award for the director at Cannes last year.