This satiric comedy uses one woman's attempts to straighten out her life as a metaphor for the search for peace in a world of chaos. Vera (Natalia Buzko) is an eccentric young woman who is stuck in an unhealthy relationship with an abusive man. Vera appeals to a young doctor to help her get away from her significant other, but the doctor's intervention accidentally leads to the boyfriend's death. Vera responds by putting her lover's body into a suitcase and wandering the streets, confronting those who cross her path. Vtorostepyenniye Lyudi was screened in competition at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival.
Mark Deming, www.allmovie.com
A physician accidentally kills somebody. For a long time he carries the body about with him in a suitcase, vainly attempting to get rid of it. The living figures blend into the texture of the film as if they were descendants of mummified or artificially created bodies. They apparently suffer from being pale shadows of other people, their bodies manipulated and directed by an other-worldly force. At the end, however, the “corpse” comes back to life. Save for human neuroses, none of the figures can be said to reflect anything. The spoken language is reminiscent of an unstructured background of noise, especially when the jaw is clenched and no rationalised syntactic chain is able to force its way through the mask of the human face.
Source : www.filmfestival-goeast.de
