The film was released in 1988. It has a very strong cast: Leonid Filatov, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, Evgeny Evstigneev, Oleg Basilashvili, Vladimir Menshov and others. The main shooting took place in the city of Kolomna.
Plot of the film
Alexey Varakin (Leonid Filatov) comes to a provincial town to agree on some technical issues as an engineer. Various absurdities begin to happen to him in the city.
In the waiting room, he sees a completely naked secretary typing on a typewriter. And no one pays attention to this. In the restaurant, as a gift from the chef, he is given a cake in the form of his, Varakin's, head. If he refuses to eat the cake, the cook commits suicide.
In the local history museum, he sees absolutely incompatible and historically impossible things: Trojans, Romans, modern leaders, everything is mixed up in a wild tangle. Alexei Varakin is predicted that he will die in this city and never leave it. As Gogol in “The Inspector General” “has only one decent person - the prosecutor…”, so in this film one prosecutor decides to help Varakin, whispering to him: “Run!”. When an engineer decides to sail away in a boat, there are no oars in it.
Decoding of some signs
Promotional video:
Sergey Georgievich Kara-Murza in his book "Manipulation of Consciousness" tried to decipher some of the things from this film.
The naked typist, to which no one pays attention, is the introduction of pornography, prostitution and other things into modern society in order to knock out traditional values from consciousness: family, marriage, love.
Secretary. A still from the movie * City of Zero *.
The head cake is an attempt to accustom society to the sight of blood, murder, cruelty. Now we see how much of all this is on our screens: thrillers, horror films, action films … Blood splashes from the screens!
Cake. A still from the movie * City of Zero *.
Events in the local history museum are a way to change historical values. Now this happens all the time. The role of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War is forgotten in the world, some events in our history are being rewritten. They make absurd, as it is now customary to say "fake", discoveries.
Museum. A still from the movie * City of Zero *.
Kara-Murza wrote and drew an analogy of moments from the film with the events of Gorbachev's perestroika. But it seems that all this continues to this day. When people live in such absurdity, you can instill anything in them, knock them out of normal life. This very idea can be seen in this brilliant film.
