A truly fascinating rarity from the U.S.S.R., Karen Shahknazarov’s wickedly droll satire proves that the country Reagan called an ‘Evil Empire’ was radically changing in the late 1980s. Half Kafka paranoia and partly a Valentine to American freedoms, it takes the psychological temperature of a society that just plain no longer functions. Leonid Filatov’s unflappable engineer arrives in a rural Russian town and might as well be a Soviet Alice dropped down a rabbit hole — things get crazier and crazier, and nobody wants to let him in on the cosmic joke. The weird tale’s strength is its visual creativity, but it also generates an unexpected affection for its characters, nice people caught in a frustrating system.
Zerograd
Blu-ray
Deaf Crocodile
1988 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 103 min. / Gorod Zero, Zero City / Street Date November 29, 2022 / Available from / 39.98
Starring: Leonid Filatov, Oleg Basilashvili, Vladimir Menshov, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Evgeniy Evstigneev,...
Zerograd
Blu-ray
Deaf Crocodile
1988 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 103 min. / Gorod Zero, Zero City / Street Date November 29, 2022 / Available from / 39.98
Starring: Leonid Filatov, Oleg Basilashvili, Vladimir Menshov, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Evgeniy Evstigneev,...
- 10/18/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Frunze Dovlatyan’s breezy, strange and intriguing 1966 drama gets a deserved rerelease
This intriguing and mysterious romantic drama from 1966 is directed by Armenian film-maker Frunze Dovlatyan; it was entered into competition at Cannes that year and is now rereleased. Hello, It’s Me! often has that kind of freewheeling breeziness that you might associate with the 60s; at other times, I found myself thinking of Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman.
The distinguished Armenian stage and screen actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan plays a fictional young scientist called Artyom, based on the real-life figure of Artem Alikhanian, who during the second world war became one of the pioneers of Soviet nuclear physics.
This intriguing and mysterious romantic drama from 1966 is directed by Armenian film-maker Frunze Dovlatyan; it was entered into competition at Cannes that year and is now rereleased. Hello, It’s Me! often has that kind of freewheeling breeziness that you might associate with the 60s; at other times, I found myself thinking of Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman.
The distinguished Armenian stage and screen actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan plays a fictional young scientist called Artyom, based on the real-life figure of Artem Alikhanian, who during the second world war became one of the pioneers of Soviet nuclear physics.
- 5/24/2021
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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