Entertainment

THE VANISHED EMPIRE

RETURN with us now to Moscow 1973 and a student named Sergey, who is more interested in American jeans, Pink Floyd, pot and, of course, girls than in his Marxist history classes.

His life, those of two male buddies and his beautiful girlfriend, Lidia, unfold in “The Vanished Empire,” the latest from veteran Russian filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov.

Sergey (Alexander Lyapin) lives at home with his younger brother, his mother and his grandfather, a noted archaeologist. The boy couldn’t care less about his future — until he meets Lyuda (Natalie Portman look-alike Lidia Milyuzina).

But wooing the young woman doesn’t go smoothly. He buys her what he thinks is a rare Rolling Stones album — but is, he discovers with much embarrassment, actually Tchaikovsky’s readily available “Swan Lake.”

Shakhnazarov — his previous films include the Kafka-esque “Zero City” (1989) and the black comedy “Poisons, or the World History of Poisoning” (2001) — came of age during the Soviet Union’s Communist days and brings firsthand experience to the Brezhnev-era “The Vanished Empire.”

It paints an entirely different picture of the Soviet days than does Aleksei Balabanov’s “Cargo 200,” which played here earlier this year.

According to Balabanov, living under communism was hellish. Shakhnazarov, on the other hand, evokes pleasant nostalgia for the same period.

In Russian, with English subtitles. Running time: 105 minutes. Not rated (sexuality). At the Quad, 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.— Musetto