Cidade 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.

I only saw one scene from this film, in the 'entertainment' section of a TV news magazine from India. the clip they showed was from a scene in a restaurant, and was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen, though with a strong sense of black humor, not gross or repulsive. here's the scene in brief (for those who want to read about it):

a guy dining by himself in a corner of the restaurant, is approached by the staff with dessert (covered by a lid). the guy tells them he didn't order any dessert, but the staff persist him to partake of it, saying that the cook made it specially for him and that if he doesn't eat it, the cook will be heartbroken. the guy glances over to the kitchen door, and sees the cook ready to slice his own throat with a knife. alarmed, he agrees to taste the dessert. the staff take off the lid, and the guy gasps as he sees his own head on the platter! the staff tells him to relax, as it is just a cake made to look like his head. they carve a slice off the top of the 'head' and serve it to the bewildered and scared guy.

I have been looking for this film since 1988, & hope it gets a DVD release soon. and based on just that one scene, I would recommend this film strongly to anyone who likes David Lynch, The Coen Bros, Franz Kafka, etc...or anyone who wants to see something different for a change (that is, after you are done with your Matrix, Charlie's Angels, etc. of course).

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.

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.