trile
Elementary basics in film art school - old Russian movies. Maybe not something for ordinary man, but this is the picture on both sides. It's amazing how amongst everyday blockbuster clones this brilliant piece slipped in. Get everybody's attention and make them watch it.The only thing I want to concentrate here is the difference between American and Russian mind. U.S. had lost the war in 'Nam but there are billion movies about successes and victories; today after the 9/11 patriotic element is in every, but every movie, whether it is political or not, and on the other side you have guys like Clooney who create opposite thing like in Syriana. They call it 'the truth' but many claim he is traitor. But this is not a political disscusion. The thing I want to point out is that Konchalovsky stays in the middle. Checheny is big thing for Russia, but he is political in a way it becomes apolitical movie, because common man is after all apolitical - too small to apprehend borders, power, money and war! Bravo!
sunman88
I watched this movie on 7/14/06 with the Middle east ablaze and the Bush Administration still spouting their tired nonsense about democracy while Palestinians are slaughtered by the scores. Folks, the only language we, homosapiens, understand is force. Northern Ireland, Palestine, Chechnya and on and on. Might makes right and the rest is fluff. The movie is not so much, at least I don't think so, a commentary on the war on Chechnya as much as it is on human follies. For those of us who have known the wrath of a woman the scene after the newly-wed husband leaves and she stabs his pictures with a broken glass is so frontal-lobe. And then the silence when he returns! A master piece indeed! Perhaps the moral of the story is that might IS right and love insane! Enjoy.
bostonfilmfan
A soldier chased by the enemy while on a military mission finds himself in an insane asylum, meets a slightly insane but charming girl and by the end of the film decides to join the ranks of the asylum patients, to escape the insane world at war. I am not describing the plot of House of Fools, but of a 1966 French film Le Roi de Coeur (King of Hearts).A kind and loving and slightly crazy girl falls in love with someone who deceives her, but despite the bitter disappointment, smiles at people through her tears. I am not describing House of Fools", but Nights of Cabiria.A kind and loving girl lives in terrible conditions, but music and singing help her to escape from reality. During her escape sessions from the most tragic moments of her life she imagines people around her singing and smiling. And yet again, I am not talking about House of Fools, I am talking about Dancer in the Dark.A colorful gang of crazy characters of every possible kind, of which the most colorful one is a Rubenesque lady with a strong personality was not invented by A. Konchalovsky, either. (I am sorry, but this idea belongs to the late Maestro Fellini.) Even the song that is used to make a statement throughout the film was borrowed from Don Juan de Marco. The Spanish dancers just had to come along with the song, too.One is surprised at the amount of allusions. In fact there are so many "allusions" (or shall we call them "borrowings"?) that nothing original is left when you peel this "onion". It is a bad film despite strong cinematography and acting.
Michael DeZubiria
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a great movie that was based on an even greater book, but I wish people wouldn't compare this movie to that one so often. Yes, the similarities are extensive and impossible to miss, but House of Fools, as the title translates into English, is a different film that has it's own weight and it's own meanings. This is not, by any means whatsoever, another vision of Ken Kesey's classic, nor is it a remake in any way of that of Milos Forman. (spoilers) Yuliya Vysotskaya, who played Janna, the main character, delivers a wonderful performance of this woman who lives in a mental hospital right on the Russian border during the Chechen War (a war about which I admittedly know absolutely nothing). Her ailment is never made clear (nor are any of the others), except for a scene in the middle of the movie where she reveals, through dialogue, some of what are probably many more illusions (I won't count her illusory belief that she can dance). As she is being abandoned by Ahmed, who she thinks is the love of her life, she tells him that she loves him, and asks him to please don't kill her. Then she tells the mud that she loves it, and please don't kill her, etc.Her mental condition is not important, although her character, while skillfully performed, is so laden with a cloying freight of symbolism that it often becomes difficult to see her as a person rather than a heavily symbolic character in a heavily symbolic movie. There is a common misconception (supported by the movie's very own tagline) that the doctors at the mental hospital around which the story revolved abandoned the patients, leaving them to fend for themselves during the Chechen War during which the movie takes place. I don't really understand this assertion, since the doctor returns at the end of the film, explains what happened to him when he went to find a bus to transfer the patients to a better hospital. Just the fact that he returned should have been enough to show that he didn't simply ditch them all.I wish I had a better memory for the names of the characters in the movie, because one of the other patients, the one with the wraparound glasses and the backpack full of his poetry, played a significant role in the movie. He and Janna are clearly the mother and father figures for the rest of the patients when they are left to their own devices, seeing over the rest of the cast and, periodically, offering the chance for audience members to question the validity of their respective mental instabilities. I don't know much about mental disorders, but there were certainly scenes in this movie where it seemed to me that they were being treated for more mental instability than they regularly displayed. These were balanced out, however, by scenes where they each displayed rather crippling disabilities, his the complete inability to communicate or assess situations effectively, and hers some dangerous attachment issues and the displacement of emotions onto things like inanimate objects. As far as the war goes, I won't go into detail about the meaning of the war itself in the film because, like I mentioned above, I know nothing about the war that is going on offscreen, but the movie makes some interesting points about the chaos and destructiveness of war. One of them is the almost-cliché of the man who saves another man's life, only to find himself fighting on the opposite side from him later on. Sort of a cliché by now, yes, but it adds to the movie's later concentration on the chaos and confusion surrounding war in general. There are several scenes in which the mental patients are understandably terrified and utterly lost as to what is going on around them. This is to be expected, but there are also several scenes in which the soldiers and even their commanders are pretty confused as to what is happening. One tense scene has two opposing factions facing each other (notably making an illicit drug deal), when one of the soldiers carelessly stumbles on his gun, making it fire off a few rounds into the air, which leads to the two groups firing machine guns at each other for several seconds before anyone realizes that it was all just a stupid mistake. The soldier who accidentally caused it laughs it off.The references to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are everywhere. The patients are left to their own devices (in this case because the doctor left longer than intended because he was delayed by the war, in the other case because McMurphy persuaded them all to escape for a while), which has a healing effect on all of them but not enough to make any of them want to leave the hospital, their home, at the end of the film. There's an interesting element of the movie involving Bryan Adams, who literally colors Janna's life with his music, even though she has a completely delusional relationship with him, which would seem to have a detrimental effect on her mental health. What I see by his occasional entrances into the movie are not some weak effort to provide recognizance by inserting an American pop star, but a layered effect of meaning that reflects the many other layers of meaning in the film. Bryan Adams, while he is not meant to have had a real relationship with this woman who thinks that she is engaged to him, lights up her life with his music (notice how the color fills the screen when it's playing), while she attempts to do the same for the rest of the patients with her own accordion playing. She doesn't always succeed with all of them, but she certainly does much more than she does with the soldiers, who she also plays for on more than one occasion, and is laughed at each time (which may very well signify some kind of juvenile cynicism among the lower ranks of military forces). I don't pretend to understand every level of symbolism that is portrayed in this movie, but it's important to notice that they're there. It's amazing how much more meaning and importance some little movie from Russia like this has than the typical multi-million dollar blockbuster released here in America, and I really wish that people would pay at least a tiny bit more attention to the few movies released (dare I say the majority of which come from other countries?) that actually mean something. There are a lot of things in this movie that are difficult to comprehend, indeed, many which seem to be in the movie as examples of pure artistic expression, but the movie as a whole, like it's main character, is so laden with meaning and symbolism that it is virtually impossible to see it all on just one viewing. The movie deserves at LEAST that much.
