Gorod Zero

Gorod Zero = Zerograd = City Zero opens with engineer Alexei Varakin (from the Moscow Engineering Works) arriving by train at a small provincial town. It is the dawn of a rainy, depressing day; the station is deserted and no other passenger alights. The only other things that move are a dog that sniffs Varakin's suitcase and the only taxi in town looking for a fare.

After checking in a seedy hotel Varakin waits until morning and walks to his destination, a factory that supplies air conditioners to his company. At the checkpoint nobody knows about his visit and there is no pass to enter the factory. After a strained telephone conversation he reaches the offices and introduces himself to the manager, who has no idea of the reason for Varakin's visit. Puzzled, the manager calls the chief engineer and is informed that he died months ago, plainly without the manager noticing,

Obviously the initial scenes evoke Kafka, K. Arriving at (the vicinity of) The Castle and there are other whiffs of Kafka such as The Process in the second half but this movie is something else. In the rest of the film Varakin is the protagonist of a series of happenings, each absurd in itself (such as a secretary working stark naked) but having a certain crazy internal logic and connecting to each other with the twisted logic of dreams. In one, episode he happens upon a museum absurdly placed in an inaccessible spot in the countryside and built in an abandoned mine shaft. He is the only visitor and is given a tour by the museum curator. Varakin is informed that the origins of the town connect with errant Trojans and with a subsequent occupation by Roman legions. Another treasury of the museum: Attila's bed, where he raped some queen or other. There are dioramas everywhere illustrating distorted history, and the wax figures seem to be live people; some of the dioramas are accompanied by gaudy music and kitschy light shows. Varakin is frustrated at every episode; he is prevented from returning to his family in Moscow and ii accused of transgressions of which he knows nothing.

Some of the Soviet reality of the time is imbedded in the dream; the absurd logic of a decaying and malfunctioning political system, the inert and unmovable bureaucracy, the repression of popular trends and music (rock-and-roll). The overall effect is that of a stress dream built out of a distorted reality where the dreamer is thrust in situations he doesn't understand or knows how to get out of.

By all means watch this movie. It has not reached the commercial streaming services but you can find a pristine copy with subtitles in You Tube, courtesy of distributor Mosfilm.

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.

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.

"If Shakhnazarov isn't a supernal filmmaker of visual finesse and most members of its male-dominant cast is far too grim and starchy by simply performing in rote, whereas their opposite sex is dismally reduced to peripheral ciphers, namely, a nude secretary, a glamorous woman functions merely as a chauffeur, or a voiceless matron whose sincere request of a dance is interrupted by the male intrusion, ZEROGRAD still remains a marvel to watch, not merely validated by Shakhnazarov's sensible political concerns and his homegrown compassion, but also, more impressively, by the astonishing tableaux vivants which crop up in the midstream and near the coda (offering ironic, anachronistic remarks to further muddy the waters), credited to its production designer Lyudmila Kusakova. It takes some time for viewers to discern that those museum exhibitions are actually actors in heterogeneous costumes and under maquillage, betrayed by tiny movements that are almost imperceptible, what billows out is that strange aroma of "magical surrealism" that is ever so fertile in the Eastern European cinema edifice."

read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks

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.