Lalka (1968 Wojciech Has & scr)

This is set in Warsaw, but everything seems Russian. It's the late 19th Century, and Mariusz Dmochowski seems a good businessman, running a shop in partnership with old friend Tadeusz Fijewski. 

We think he may be interested in this woman (Beata Tyszkiewski), but we're not sure:

But at this church service he spots another young woman, and follows her:

There's a beautiful scene (long single take tracking shot) in which they seem to follow each other at a distance down a hill, showing a transition between the wealthy top part of town and a miserable underclass beneath. He enters her lodging but rather than accepting the offered sex, he instructs her to get cleaned up and he will find her a job as a seamstress.

Has likes his long elegant tracking shots past things such as the rows of decorative crap in the shop. There's talk of trade and politics and property. At this point I'm not really sure what sort of film I'm watching, though I'm getting a Chekhovy vibe.

About an hour and three quarters in the story switches to an elegant country house where there's a ball, and Dmochowski  encounters an inventor he knows and who shows him a mysterious floating metal alloy. And it was at that point I realised what kind of film I was watching - a Tarkovsky kind of film (and believe me, there aren't many of those around). And suddenly in that light the whole film really reminded me of Andrei Rublev - not in the story department, of course, but in the episodic journey of a man.

Things finally seem settled with the woman:

... though they're really not.

A long, marvellous film, beautifully photographed by Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz with music by Wojciech Kilar, based on a novel by Boleslaw Prus. Great ornate production design and detail too.

His other films look worth checking out, e.g. Jak Byc Kochana (1963), The Saragossa Manuscript (1964), The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) and An Uneventful Story (1983), based on Chekhov, though some are hard to find.