Intrigue

Madcap comedy set in early 20th century Kyiv about a barber whose fondness for drink, gambling, and women lead to bankruptcy. He marries an ugly rich woman to solve his financial woes, but pines for a virtuous beauty who despises him.

In the early 20th-century Kyiv, a young rascal named Svyryd Holokhvostyi (Not-A-Penny) owns a barbershop, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. Holokhvostyi spends most of his time drinking, gambling, and chasing women. After his shop is seized by the police for unpaid debts, Holokhvostyi decides to marry a rich but pathetically ugly Pronia and thus to solve his pecuniary woes.

Pronia, ashamed of her unfashionable Ukrainian origins and her simple Ukrainian parents, is easily beguiled by her suitor's "aristocratic manners". She eagerly accepts his marriage proposal. In a parallel line of action, Holokhvostyi proposes to the beautiful but poor Halia who rejects him. By pretending to be rich, he persuades Sekleta Lymerykha, Halia's mother, to marry Halia off to him. His pursuit of wealth and love quickly proves to be a recipe for his own undoing.

It creates a lot of hilarious situations for today's viewer who immediately recognizes in this movie some of the perennial themes of the Ukrainian condition: the laughable imperial arrogance and artificiality of high Russian culture imposed upon common Ukrainian folk, the futility of chasing it, of pretending to be what you are not. It is thanks to this continuing resonance with specifically Ukrainian sensibilities that the story enjoys an undiminished popularity even today.

The movie is based on the stage-play by Mykhailo Starytskyi "Za dvoma zaytsiamy" (Chasing Two Hares), 1883. The play was a theater adaptation of the story "Na kozhum'yakakh" (In the District of Kozhum'yaky) by another Ukrainian classic Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky.