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Barnet confirmed his great talent with these two films. He was unparalleled in evoking comedy and romance by the sea or in the snow, in the steppe or in the city, on moving trains or in the claustrophobic flats; by the 1930s, it was just a question of whether the ex-boxer would be able to stay in the ring with Stalin. Barnet’s version of the class war is that it’s petty and to be avoided. His conflicts in both these comedies are between landlords and tenants, not huge political actors, and he believes in the force of love more than in the force of history. His films could take place anywhere people struggle to find a place for themselves free of authority.

As the Stalinist crackdown on the cinema began, Barnet shifted the settings of his movies from Moscow to dream worlds as removed from the Soviet Union as he could get away with making them. After the ’20s, romantic longing and a compatible desire to do a job as well as possible under the circumstances take his films from the fast-paced, crazy Moscow of his youth into hinterlands.

A wayside more than a central work, his 1932 Okraina ("The Outskirts"; August 22 at 12:15 p.m. and August 26 at 2:30 p.m.) shows us the flip side of the Barnet world view. Set during World War I, this early-sound film unfolds in a war-torn town bereft of compassion or humor. The soundtrack, like that of Pudovkin’s Deserter notably eclectic in its use of different kinds of sound sources, helps the director evoke a lonely world. Barnet was a soldier on the front lines of the Revolution, and he poured his memories of war into this story about a German POW who goes to work for a shoemaking collective. The town appears blighted, a place that hangs onto existence without the things Barnet loves.

By the Bluest of Seas, which evidently exists in both color and black-and-white versions, is Barnet in his prime. It takes place on an island paradise in the Caspian that for all its Tempest-like isolation can’t escape Soviet bureaucracy. Two fishermen, Alesha (Nikolai Kryuchkov) and Yussuf (Lev Sverdlin), who represent the European Soviet Union and the Central Asian, compete for the love of a pale island blonde, Misha (Yelena Kuzmina), who can’t decide between them. The film is never didactic. Its desire is not for Soviet unity but for a kind of perfect union that exists only in tales or dreams. The way Barnet brings this microcosm to life is wholly original and charmed. By the Bluest of Seas has been favorably compared with Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, but it breathes a salt air all its own. A scene set below deck as the three lovers are tossed by a storm attests that this is one of the essential films of the 1930s, a threesome movie as accomplished as Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living.

The MFA is skipping Barnet’s ’40s and ’50s films and concluding the series with Alenka, a film that until we see more by Barnet has to be considered his masterpiece. Named for one of its characters, a little girl who could be a younger version of Misha, the film takes place in 1955, six years before it was made. Surely the most gorgeous Soviet color film of its era, Alenka is so vibrant, it has a physical presence. By 1961, Barnet’s ability to pop his characters out from vast landscapes was like no one else’s. He does the same thing when they occupy train stations, schoolrooms, and ice huts, a rare filmmaker at ease both indoors and out. His special ability with actresses may have something to do with his seven marriages — it’s said he remained friends with all his ex-wives. Every woman his camera encounters, from the glamorous to the goofy-looking, becomes a model of healthy pulchritude, as if he were a Frank Tashlin with more heart.

Alenka is a journey film in which several characters travel together through the steppe on their way to new homes on the Kazakh frontier. As they progress, they’re quizzed by a little girl, and they reveal their life stories to her. The narratives are by turns light and dark, comic and romantic, even instructional. (Alenka’s own story is about learning math.) Barnet’s handling of them is both nimble and formal, as if Tati had shot a script meant for Max Ophuls. The comparison is strained because Barnet is so uniquely his own.

It’s hard to choose which story is best. One is about a young dentist who longs for her own dentist’s chair. Another finds a city girl moving with her love to Siberia or someplace because he has the heroic mission of keeping half-built roads clear of snow for the expanding Soviet state. She has to contend not only with cultural isolation and cold but with his bad taste in art as well. Another story, a tragic one about a drowning, is black and somber, the best cinematic evocation of Gogol, surprising and exceptional in a human comedy that’s a Russian version of Booth Tarkington, a happy Magnificent Ambersons set among Sovcolor wheat fields in Central Asia. Everyone should see this film.