Mister Designer (1988)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I love this film, I first saw in 1989. It is not an all time great masterpiece, of course, mostly because of its imperfect, but still very good directing (actually it was debut work of this film's director). However, that is well forgivable regarding awesome music and stunning performance by Viktor Avilov, who is as great in this role, as no one could ever be. The movie perfectly conveys the atmosphere of Russian Decadence, the cultural phenomenon, which is also called "The Silver Age" of Russian culture. It was a period since approx. 1905 till the beginning of WW1 in 1914. To understand what it was you must have a cultural experience of being a Russian. You have to feel its beautiful enigmatic spirit in poetry, prose, music and painting of that era, penetrated with troubled anticipation of great changes to come. Having seen this film, you will be haunted by this atmosphere - only if you are able to tune yourself to its wavelength. If you are a fan of scary movies like "Hellraiser" or "Elm street Nightmare" - just skip it. There is nothing in Western cinema to be compared with this. It must be emotionally experienced to say whether you like it or not, depending on your personal emotional constitution. As for myself, this film is rather a philosophic story about an artist, who dared to challenge the God and was punished for that. It bears a powerful emotional impact, amplified by times by the great music score. I give the movie 10/10, forgiving flaws of directing.

Famous decorator, maker of mannequins Platon Andreevich (beautiful play of Victor Avilov) has been long trying to compete with God wishing to create a chef-d'oeuvre, over which time would have no power. To decorate a show window of a jewelry shop, he picks a model - young girl in her final stage of tuberculosis. It is clear that the girl will soon die, therefore great is the decorator's amazement, when, after 6 years, he encounters that very young lady who is presented to him as a wife of a rich merchant whose house he is supposed to decorate. The rich merchant (M.Kozakov) is dead set to learn more about his wife's past, to which, he suspects, Platon Andreevich holds a key. This search after truth, however, turns out to be a deadly quest for the merchant: he dies a mysterious death, after having lost all his fortune to the decorator over a card table. Well, as you might have understood, this lady is not the former model, whose neglected grave Platon Andreevich finally locates at one of the Saint-Petersburg cemeteries. It is the waxen mannequin who got the life of its own, having turned into the antipode of its meek original. It is now clear that the decorator is doomed to fall victim to his Frankensteinian monster - the feeling of the inevitable death is enhanced by the beautiful, somewhat muffled recitation of the poem "Don Juan".