“The gentry! They're worse than the peasants,” declares a servant in this giddily verbose dissection of the foibles and follies of the idle classes, based on Chekhov's Platonov but bitingly contemporary in its skewering of intellectual pretension. “Lacking means, ladies and gentlemen, we inherit ideas,” claims the schoolteacher Mikhail (in a statement that could echo through any college) to a gathering of the friends, family, and neighbors of a wealthy young widow. Nearly everyone is materially better off than he, but Mikhail has a sharper tongue, and doesn't mind using it on the buffoons in attendance. (“They've got no servants of their own to flog, so he chooses us,” sniffs one.) At the film's heart, however, is Mikhail's sudden re(dis)connection with an old flame; through their shared disappointments, one can see the sorrow of a life lived through ideas alone. Unrelenting in its verbal barrage attacking intellectual fakery of any kind, Unfinished Piece is perfect for the Russian noble-or the postgraduate-in us all.