Anna Karamazoff

Does the title, referring to the Russian classics (Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov), create a framework for analogies and thus understanding the meaning of the film? No.) This film does not want to be bound by a coherent narrative and instead wants to rely on a chain of surreal scenes that depart from film realism towards emotional and atmospheric pulsation that aims to draw the viewer into the film despite its overall lack of meaning. However, the film is not just a completely free sequence of fragments of the author's subconscious, suffering from total discontinuity (a problem of many surrealisms) - in Khamdamov's film, there are many recurring motifs that run throughout the entire film and allow not only for a certain basic reconstruction of the temporal and narrative axis (although this is only secondary), but mainly to truly enjoy the atmosphere of the film or rather the atmosphere of the fictional world in which it takes place. It is a world that is typically "supernatural," timeless, sometimes mysteriously empty (the empty subway - in Russia!), and sometimes populated by strange characters in unexpected places; it is truly an imaginary world where "real" scenes can be replaced by scenes from another film (supposedly Khamdamov's Nechayannye radosti, banned by authorities in the 1970s and 1980s) without everything ceasing to make "sense," which is missing anyway... (18.09.2015)