Awards : Bélier d'or du meilleur film russe en 1994
Prix "Kinochoc" de la meilleure réalisation à Anapa, 1993
Plot synopsis
After a heavy drinking party several people living in a dreadful St.
Petersburg communal apartment find in it a window that opens...on Paris. This is the beginning of a series of funny adventures
of the Russians in the “city of their dreams” and of incredible
experience of French “guests” on the banks of the Neva river. Russian
personages of the film enjoy their wanderings down Paris streets while the French go through all the ordeals of every day life in Russia...
The film was awarded the Prize for the Film Director’s Work at the KINOSHOK Festival in Anapa (1993); the Special Prize of “Yunge Welt” news-paper at the International Film Festival in Berlin (1994). Source : www.lenfilm.ru
Commentaries
Yuri Mamin’s international hit is an endearing, absurd cross-cultural comedy that caricatures Russian and French national stereotypes. The inhabitants of a communal apartment in St Petersburg discover a hidden window in the back of a wardrobe that magically transports them to Paris. Naturally, they all charge across to experience the good life. Paris is cast as materialistic and decadent in contrast to the spiritual, but decaying Russian culture with its backwardness and drunkenness the source of most jokes. A scathing critique of blind materialism this is a highly original comic masterpiece.
Source : www.russianresurrection.com
