Country of the Deaf (1998)
Strana Glukhikh is about an unusual relationship between two women, one of them a deaf-mute dancer and the other on the run from the mafia. Yaya, the deaf girl, offers to hide Rita whose boyfriend, Alyosha owes gambling debts to the mafia, but in return she wants her to leave the young man and run off with her to an imaginary paradise where material values do not exist.
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Such a frustrating disappointment
Purely Joyful Movie!
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.
not in common rules limits. but interesting metaphor about escape, friendship, need of certitude and illusion and search to discover yourself in the other. far to be perfect, with too large slice of contemporary Russian reality, it remains beautiful first for two virtues - the performance of Dina Korzun and Chiulpan Kamatova and the end. a film about two women and their choices. that is all. a kind of parable. or only a film about importance of small things. many unrealistic scenes. but the science of actresses to give inspired solutions really works. a movie who can be good occasion to reflection. about the tools to create a decent drama with influences of Russian theater, to discover image from East in a cruel manner, to remember the fascination of great Soviet movies.
"Country of the Deaf" is one of the best Russian movies of 90's. Also it is a rare example of the movie dedicated to the discovery of the subculture of deaf people in modern Russian society.Valery Todorovsky has created tense, fast, sometimes violent movie with deep characters. It is not only about loneliness, love and hate of deaf people. It is about all of us - about the post-soviet generation.And of course, Chulpan Hamatova, Dina Korzun and Maksim Sukhanov are great (as usually) - Russian actor's school continues to be one of the major ones in the world.
A film for the people who can take their time to think about it. All the problems revealed in it are typical not for the "external" life of the country, but for the people's minds. That's why it seems to be a bit "grotesque" and "uninteresting".
This is exactly the kind of film that is being made in the crime-infested present day Russia. The dialog is so primitive as if it was written by semi-literate people, the acting is uniformly awful and grotesque. The whole allegory about the land of the deaf is laughable. The characters are so annoying you wish them all dead as soon as possible. What a terrible waste of celluloid.