Gorod Zero

I saw this film while living in Moscow in the late 80s/early 90s and it truly summarizes a lot of the bizarreness of day-to-day Soviet life. The engineer visits this small provincial town where nothing is normal and he encounters all sorts of weird people. It's a very absurd story, but if you understand the way the old USSR worked, it makes a strange sort of sense.

This late Soviet movie by Mosfilm, directed by great Russian filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov, is an absurdist dark absurdist comedy with hilarious bizarre moments. By making a satire of the last years of the Soviet Union, it seems a mashup of Monty Python, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and The Truman Show. I laughed loud! It is greater than the other movie by director Karen Shakhnazarov I had already watched, We're from Jazz, from five years before, which also has comedy, dancing scenes (something recurrent in his filmography), and a discussion about the spreding of Western music and culture.

This movie is a fable of our life - we eventually - every single of us - few exceptions happen, arrive to unknown place and get trapped there to never - most of us break free. And the rest of our life we spend watching without any disbelief at idiocy and absurd around us and abandoning any hope to take a train to Moscow. This movie is Checkov's Cherry Orchard retold in today's words with memory of absurd history of XX cent. So sweet for a Western heart explanation of Soviet system as "oppressive communist regime" has nothing to do with reality - oppression was not coming from KGB, it was in the hopeless idiotism, status quo, absolute stagnation. Sci Fi experiment, the one word which describes the life in USSR is "boring". We know that without sensory inputs, deprived of them our brain starts to generate illusions. This is what you see in this "movie", I put it in commas because for me it is not a fiction movie, it is a documentary.

I was quite surprised to see this another masterpiece from Karen Shahnazarov. This is real fantasy with the good presence of mystics and social criticism. The main character is an ordinary engineer who comes to an obscure town to fix some business questions. But instead of it he faces very gloomy and weird freedom there. The real hymn of irrationality and rock music. This film looks more like a nightmare dream of a narrow-minded person who comes to some other reality and succeeds to go away in the end. One can see some nudity, psycho- violence and questioning here, but the meaning lies beyond the moral standards of that time in in the USSR.

An unknown little treasure of the Soviet cinema, based on the story of a man sent to a town where nothing seems real. Definitely a feast for lovers of true cinema, while slow at times, is an intriguing, minimalistic piece of work. In fact this slowness, added to the lack of music and dialog at parts, becomes a plus for the film in a strange way. The whole movie has a dreamlike, Eraserhead-ish atmosphere, so slyly given that you often feel like you're watching someone's dream on the screen.

I can't help but agree that, as one other reviewer has mentioned, there are quite a number of references to the Soviet way of life of the period, but naturally they may be hard to catch for everyone. Still, this does not detach the audience.

Certainly not for fans of hollywood crap, but movie fans who want to see something unique should see Zero City.