Ivan the Idiot

This new Russian avant-garde comedy is actually a collage-like reference to film classics from the all over the world (from the Marx Brothers to Rambo) as well as to Russian film history and folklore – this all wrapped up in the form of cyber-comics. Ivan (Koryagin) is returning to his native city of ‘Beyondwill’ and almost runs over a girl (Kolosova) with his car. While trying to help the girl, who suffers from amnesia, he finds out that she has run away from the clinic of the mad genius Dr. Strauss (Yuhananov). Not only is the evil doctor secretly in love with the girl, he has also made her the subject of a medical experiment gone wrong, hooking up her brain to a computer which constantly plunges her into a parallel reality. She has a little trouble adjusting to the world once she’s out of the clutches of the diabolical Dr. Strauss. But is she really out of his clutches? In an attempt to keep the woman he loves, Dr. Strauss pulls off one last dastardly deed. He uses his computer to hide the girl deep in a sublevel reality from which Ivan wants to free her. ‘Ivan the Idiot’ is one of the most popular personages from Russian folklore. His story serves as the basic fable of the film: Ivan as hero saving a sleeping beauty from the clutches of evil. This is a must-see for connoisseurs of Russian culture.