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"A deliciously cheerful satire about the legacy of Stalin, personal identity and the political importance of rock-and-roll. . . . Karen Shakhnazarov, the director and co-writer, establishes a tone that is eerie without being sinister, and goes on to invent a story that is comic and fluent yet full of dangerous turns." - Caryn James, The New York Times
One of the key films of the perestroika era. A Moscow engineer named Varakin (beautifully played, in an increasingly bewildered deadpan performance, by Leonid Filatov) arrives in a small town, with instructions to change the size of a locally manufactured air conditioner part. At the company office he is welcomed by a naked secretary. Soon, he finds himself sitting down to lunch. The dessert arrives, a cake that strongly resembles his own head, baked by a chef who soon shoots himself in the head. With every new encounter, Varakin is sucked into the vortex of a new identity and a strange, new reality. With its images of a burdensome past (Soviet history is crammed into an elaborate diorama exposition thousands of feet below ground, to which Varakin is shepherded) and an indeterminate future, and with its roots in both the folk tale and more modern forms of absurdism, Shakhnazarov's very funny and very poignantly disorienting film is a real historical touchstone.
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