Motifs from the life and work of Absurdist writer Daniil Kharms inspired Kovalov to create a paranoid and grotesque picture of the totalitarian past. In a Leningrad communal house in 1939 hangs the scent of a suppressed sexuality that obsesses all the characters: from the weak and shy Poet to the Judge who tries on the mask of Helmut Berger from Visconti’s The Damned. The hallucinogenic images that result can only have one result: massive aggression, an armada of bombers, armed crowds that fling themselves into the struggle with the fury of spermatozoids. The film is full of newsreel footage from the time of Stalinism and the Third Reich that are cut very ingeniously through the feature fragments. With a typical mixture of aversion and affection, irony and amazement, Kovalov manages to evoke the insanity of this period.
