A Contemporary Russian Portrait

Alvis 2022-09-16 09:56:16

In a remote Russian town, Dima is a municipal plumbing maintenance worker. When he found serious penetration cracks in a nearly 40-year-old residential building in his area, he immediately reported the situation to the city government. However, due to corruption When corrupt and stubborn government officials couldn't figure out how to properly accommodate the residents of the building, Dima nearly got killed.

The plot time span is less than 24 hours, and the story is very simple, but the corruption and political status quo revealed has been a pain in the skin of Russia for a long time. It is crumbling, it implies the causal law of a society with deep-rooted corruption on the brink of political and economic disaster, and what is even more frustrating and desperate is that the residents of the building are unaware that the danger is coming, they almost accept and get used to this cruel reality. .

There are several scenes in the film that show the current state of life in Russia's marginalized small towns. At the beginning of the film, Dima and his parents and wife eat around a table with only bread and soup on the table, and the mother begins to complain that the father has been "righteous" all his life. People", but in the end, life is still tight, and the surrounding neighbors rely on petty thefts to live relatively peacefully and comfortably. As for the residents living in the dangerous building, adults rely on alcohol and domestic violence to numb their feelings about the status quo, young people use marijuana in the dark corridors to escape the future with no way out, Dima at night In the long shot of walking on the street, there is no one person or a moving car on the deadly street. It seems that everyone is at home at this time. They may be drinking or fighting, just like the residents of the dangerous building. The whole film traces the origin of a series of social problems, but also gives a way to solve the problems. When everyone lives like animals, our ability to perceive things around us is also degraded. For example, residents of dangerous buildings do not know that a disaster is coming Come, and the only one who can turn the situation around must be every idiot who is in danger.

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Extended Reading

The Fool quotes

  • Dima Nikitin: We live like animals and die like animals because we are nobodies to each other.

  • Fedotov: Let the kid go. He's just a plumber.