Karen Shakhnazarov’s surreal satire of Communism follows an Everyman engineer named Varakin who arrives in a remote city where nothing quite makes sense, but everyone acts as if it does. He’s quickly drawn into the investigation of the suicide (or possibly murder?) of a local restaurant chef, Nikolaev – who may (or may not) be Varakin’s missing father. The more complex and absurdist the mystery becomes, the more poignant and plaintive Varakin’s predicament – “I have to get back to Moscow,” he pleads to no avail. Along the way we’re treated to a bizarre and wonderful sideshow of non sequiturs out of a Wes Anderson film, including an underground museum filled with a thousand years of real and imagined Russian history (“Here’s the pistol with which Urusov shot the False Dimitry II.”) Frozen in time, frozen far beneath the surface, the waxwork figures are strangely beautiful and forlorn, like Shakhnazarov’s marvelous and enigmatic satire of Soviet bureaucracy.
Based on Lesya Ukrainka's drama "The Stone Master". Without the permission of the king, in Seville, under the pretext of meeting his fiancée Dolores, returns the disgraced Don Juan, a thunderstorm of husbands and grooms. The loveable protagonist gained fame as a ladies man and a wild tempest of female reputations. But for Don Juan there are no barriers to the desired goal. This time he laid eyes on the lovely Donna Anna. Obsessed with a passion for her, the hero protects her ancestral castle from the Portuguese invading the country ...
