Zerograd

Part Kafka, part Agatha Christie and part Monty Python, director Karen Shakhnazarovs 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. Hes quickly drawn into the investigation of the suicide (or possibly murder?) of a local restaurant chef, Nikolaev who may (or may not) be Varakins missing father. The more complex and absurdist the mystery becomes, the more poignant and plaintive Varakins predicament I have to get back to Moscow, he pleads to no avail. Along the way were 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 (Heres 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