Room and a Half

The great Russian film maker Andrey Khrzhanovsky, who has always been interested in Russian and world cultural history, makes an artistic treatment of the greatest Russian poet, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky and his life in the USSR.
Asked once in an interview if he were ever planning to come back to see his fatherland, Joseph Brodsky said that if he did so, it would be anonymously. For Khrzhanovsky and script writer Yuri Arabov, who presumed that Brodsky actually made the trip, this was the inspiration to make Room and a Half, an ironical fairy tale: the poet travels by ship to the country of his youth, taking the audience along as he crosses not only geographical barriers but barriers of time as well. We are transported back to the 50s and 60s in the USSR and the atmosphere of the country's cultural capital, St. Petersburg. Stylistically, the film is a perfect blend of fiction, historical footage and animation, smoothly intertwined with one another in a highly original manner. The basic facts are all connected with the life of Joseph Brodsky and his milieu. It is a fantastic, unique voyage to the country's past and its genius - delicate, intimate, revealing. (LC)