Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont

After a tumultuous life, a middle-aged headwaiter in a Parisian restaurant dreams of opening a seaside amusement park. When an old flame reappears, he reignites his feelings, but she is involved with another man.

Victor Sluzhkin signs on as a teacher of geography in a secondary school in his native Perm (in the Urals) and gets lost in a haze of hard vodka, desperate love for a nymphet-like student and the stress of educating teenagers. Geographer, as the students immediately dub Sluzhkin, attempts to escape from the grueling, dull, stultifying reality of Russia's provincial life in a rafting tour to the Urals. Accompanied by wild, adventure-seeking adolescents, faced with the numerous grim surprises of the nature, Geographer is poised to find himself and his own truth.