Trama

Going on a business trip, the hero of the film suddenly finds himself in a fantastic city. It is very similar to our world, only the hidden absurdity of everyday life here has become apparent.

An engineer in charge of the production line of a factory in Moscow is sent to a small town to try to specify the distributor the new dimensions of a mechanic part they need. But in this town everybody seems to be crazy (a secretary who works naked, a group of people take the engineer as a rock & roll player, etc) and, in addition, this man is witness of a suicide, so he is trapped inside the town.—Michel Rudoy <mdrc@hp9000a1.uam.mx>

Part Kafka, part Agatha Christie and part Monty Python, director Karen Shakhnazarov's surreal satire of Communism follows an Everyman engineer named Varakin (Leonid Filatov) 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. With music by the great Eduard Artemyev (SOLARIS, STALKER).—Deaf Crocodile Films

Having gone on a business trip, the hero of the film unexpectedly finds himself in a fantastic city. It is very similar to our world, only the hidden absurdity of everyday life here has become obvious. The city of Zero reveals one secret after another to the hero, and returning to familiar reality becomes more and more difficult.—Tango Papa