From the American psychiatric hospital run by two maniac, confident that he was a spy, and a transsexual. Very soon they will want to return to their native madhouse — but it will be too late. Because the third psycho sent them on a secret mission to Russia. Yes, even in a balloon.
rock'n'roll night visitor (uncredited)
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.
