Déjà vu (1990)

That was an excellent one.

Beautiful, moving film.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Following up Magnet, my copy does have English subtitles in packaging that is otherwise Russian, dated 2002. The translation is so bad as to add considerably to the humor: somebody has a dictionary and is taking the first entry. Thus the ship will 'float away' to Sumatra, the Chicago gang is selling 'homemade whiskey,' nary an 'a', 'an', or 'the', and very creative use of prepositions. A good fraction of the dialog is in English, enough to follow the plot even without translation.This is a different style of humor than we North Americans are used to, reminding me of the early Soviet satirist Bulkagov, or Ilf and Petrov in 'The Twelve Chairs'. The star player, Jerzy Stuhr, is strongly reminiscent of Mel Brooks, and plays a constantly frustrated American killer to the hilt. Watch for the scene on the Odessa steps.If anyone can identify who is singing the Deja Vue theme at the end, I'd be grateful.

Let me try to explain why Deja vu is one of my favorite movies ever. In the opening shots, while the credits still run across the screen, most movies will show some boring landscape. Or a hero traveling and thinking (or rather pretending to think). Deja vu starts with a scene with 4 nested meanings! As you might know, in the opera "Carmen" the soldiers shoot Carmen's lover. But all opera-goers know this is entertainment, so they don't really kill him. (SPOILER START) But in Deja Vu, the assassin is hired to kill the singer, so at the moment when the actors playing soldiers shoot him on the scene, the assassin shoots from a real gun, so the singer is killed for real!(SPOILER END) But you know it's all happening within a movie, so he's not really dead! A modern philosopher could write several thick volumes on this phenomena of nested meanings alone, but what does the director do? Throws it away, as this whole scene is just there to introduce us to the main character's profession. This is the way the whole movie is done - there is a plot, but it's full of twists, laughs and jokes on everybody and everything. You don't care much for the assassin or his target, but how can you forget the Hitler-lookalike German bike coach? Or the heroes answer to the question about his interests ("jazz, box and sex")? A scene that spoofs the famous Eisenstein's "Bronenosets Potyomkin"? It's a farce for farce's sake, and it makes you literally roll on the floor laughing.

The plot is well-known and can be put aside.Why "a dropping eye"? Dramatic elements of this comedy are as numerous as the comical ones: the girl's disappearance from the hotel, the so true-to-life strict control over every man's actions, the atmosphere of mass hysteria and phobia that can only be drowned in liquor, the pointless, though quite optimistic, existence of man in a communist society.It is one of those movies that show wit and glory of our cinema. For instance, there is no need to sit for hours with the eyes glued to the screen showing "The Godfather" trilogy. You can watch this little film of the 1988 and get a clear idea of the whole mafia monkey business.To dislike the main character (who is hit-man by profession and likes jazz, boxing, and sex) is just impossible. Look at the way he smiles and behaves - he is a kind of tragic hero, a child with a gun. Like those killer-girls from anime.Though the movie is a cult favourite for nearly every Russian cinema connoisseur and I would set it firmly in the national top 100, it is to be watched with a good background (some knowledge of the Russian language and the history of our country of the early 1920s are a must to enjoy this comedy's undercurrents) and can easily miss a westernized or oriental mind. The scene with Mayakovskiy reciting his "Ya dostayu iz shirokih shtanin..." is fabulous. The "Hitler" guy is ridiculous. The pioneer's speech about oligarchs and Charlie Chaplin is witty. The interaction with "Bronenosets Potyomkin" is over-the-top absurd. And so on and so forth.On international level it's 8 out of 10, not to everybody but still very neat. Thank you for attention.

The joint Polish-Soviet film had to be something very funny and fresh. Indeed, the very theme seems to be very promising - 1923, a police informer runs from Chicago to the Soviet city Odessa, that lies at the Black Sea coast, then, the killer is sent to murder him. This hapless killer, played by the great Jerzy Stuhr, is met with the strangling Soviet hospitality, he is mistaken with the famous scientist, he is in the series of the extremely funny gags, and finally he fails to commit his job. The play of the Russian film stars is also great - Nikolay Karachentsov plays a mafia bootlegger, and the untimely demised Viktor Stepanov plays a noisy Ukrainian farmer, also, the small role of Cesare Pazura as a German bicyclist is also great. But in general, the film is far too long, too banal often and the unnecessary nudity scenes and pointless musical interludes make it a half-hearted job.