Oleg Basilashvili Movies

This version of The Idiot, made for the Russian TV, is actually the first attempt to film the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel in its entirety. Yevgeny Mironov plays the title character, Russian Prince Myshkin, who returns to St. Petersburg after a stay in a Swiss mental hospital. The prince is not literally a mental midget; he is considered an idiot because, as an honest and upright person, he cannot keep pace with the evil in the world. He busies himself with the petty problems of his aristocratic friends, which drive him back into the recesses of insanity. Lidiya Velezheva co-stars as Nastassya Filippovna, the woman of loose morals who turns out to be the only person who truly cares about Myshkin's welfare, while Vladimir Mashkov plays the nominal villain of the piece, an iconoclastic merchant named Rogozhin, whose passion for Nastassya culminates in tragedy. The Idiot was previously filmed in France in 1946, in Japan by Akira Kurosawa in 1951, and in Russia in 1958. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Veteran director Georgi Daneliya proves that he's still in good form with this offbeat romantic comedy. When Oleg Chagin (Kirill Pirogov) learns that back home his fiancée Lena has married another man, he quits his job in Siberia and rushes to Moscow. The film depicts his trials and tribulations while attempting to win her back. ~ Yuri German, Rovi

In this satire, the Countess Masha (Lyudmila Mordovinova) is the young wife of an important government official in Tsarist Russia. She has been having a series of inexplicable nightmares. Eventually she comes to believe that they are experiences of the future - 1993 in Russia to be exact. She is horrified. When she tells her husband the contents of her dreams, he is horrified. When she dresses in a fashion from one of her dreams (the miniskirt), the Russian court is horrified. All the same, despite earnest attempts by her husband to propose some reforms which would prevent that future from happening, it is to no avail. Nothing, it seems, can prevent the "complete cretinization" of the Russia of the future. Her nightmarish dream/visions include one where she is a female government economics minister who sleeps with western moneymen in order to bamboozle loans out of them, in another, she works at a cafeteria as a waitress and must constantly be on the run to avoid being cornered by her lustful (male) coworkers. Actors from one time period reappear in other guises in the other. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

A Russian entry in the 1990 Cannes film festival, Gorrod Zero top-bills Leonid Flatov as an engineer named Varadin. Lacking a few vital parts for an air conditioner, Varadin heads off to Gorrod Zero, aka "Zero City." He might have been better off staying bed. Before long, Varadin discovers that everyone in Zero City is a few cards shy of a full deck. Before the day is over, Our Hero is almost as loopy as the rest of the batch. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Ivan (Fedor Dunaevsky) is a teenager who is suffering through the acrimonious divorce of his parents. His sympathies are all with his father, who has taken up with a younger woman, and he has nothing but scorn for his mother, who won custody of him. He tries to set his mother's apartment on fire, but fortunately enough, he fails. He also fails at getting accepted into the university in a subject chosen by his mother. Ivan is not a deep thinker and basically only wants an easy existence with enough money to enjoy some of the good things of life. Since he has graduated from high school, he has to do something, so his mother sets him up with a job as a messenger. While on his first assignment (which he messes up), he makes friends with professor's daughter Katya (Anastasiya Nemolyayeva, the daughter of the film's cinematographer Nikolai Nemolyaev), a member of Moscow's social elite. He sets his heart on winning her, even though he is a homely and uneducated housing-project bumpkin with nothing to recommend him except his persistence, engagingly bad manners and a certain originality. Despite being thrown out of the girl's apartment many times by her father (Oleg Basilashvili), he keeps coming back and eventually wins the older man's grudging respect. Kuryer first became popular as a story published in the mid-1980s. The story was humorous and addressed the real-life situations and problems that young people would face, as opposed to ideologically heavy, Party-sponsored books that dominated the market at that time. That's what made Kuryer so appealing and fresh. As it often happens, when Karen Shakhnazarov adapted his own story for the screen, some of the magic was lost in the transition. However, the film was a popular success and also received a Special Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1987, along with the Jury Prize at the Tbilisi Film Festival, a State Prize of the Russian Federation, and, finally, was voted the "Best Film of the Year" by the readers of the film magazine Sovetsky Ekran. ~ Yuri German, Rovi

A bittersweet love story between a pair of middle-aged people takes center stage in this 1982 Russian drama from director Eldar Ryazanov. After meeting by chance at a train station, Platon confesses to Vera that he'll soon be taking a legal fall for a crime his uncaring wife committed. Though romance blossoms between the two, Platon's inevitable trial and jail sentence hang over their relationship. ~ Matthew Tobey, Rovi

Sluzhebny Roman won the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 1979 and was well-received by Russian audiences. One of the most popular films by director Eldar Ryazanov, it had no overt political content and was simply a funny romantic comedy. Andrei Myagkov plays a clerk, a widower with two children; Alisa Freindlikh plays his boss, a woman so committed to her career that she spares no time for her appearance. Her manner irritates the clerk so much that he makes a bet with his office-mates that he can awaken the woman in her. He begins, therefore, to court her. She is decidedly dowdy and mannish, and the advances of her clerk catch her by surprise. She seeks advice from her best friend about how to proceed. Based on his bantering manner with her, her friend advises her to invite him to dinner. Even at dinner, she can't soften her brusque office manner, and a fight breaks out. Nonetheless, love eventually wins the day. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi