I suspect that this question may be both too specific and too vague for this forum, but here goes...
I recently tried to watch the film "Жила-была одна баба" (2011) -- I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone reading this, but I do think it has garnered some awards and is relatively well-known, perhaps because it provides such a graphic (some might say gruesome) depiction of Russian provincial life at the start of the 20th century.
Regardless of its artistic merits, though, the one thing that struck me about the film is that -- for me at least -- most of the dialogue is basically incomprehensible. Needless to say, I am not a native speaker, but I studied, lived and worked in Russia for many years, and I've always thought that my grasp of the language was very good -- in any event, I have absolutely no trouble following Russian-language movies where the dialogue is more...contemporary.
Anyway, my question is this -- for those among you who have seen the film, is the dialogue at all challenging to understand? Or is it just me?
Part of what is interesting to me about this is that underscores how subtle language can be -- "uneducated" or "sub-standard" speech (in any language) is NOT "simple"...in fact, it is often just the opposite.
The other thing that this reminds me of is that Russian seems to have more "sub-standard" variants than, say, American English -- not sure that urban or rural American English can offer anything like "Феня" for example. But again, that may just be me.