Help Gone Mad

When Jenya from Belarus has made a little money in Moscow, he wants to go home. It's just his luck that today his train doesn't go as far the terminus and he has to get off before his stop. First, he is held up and robbed of all his possessions but then, for once, fate seems to be on his side. An elderly man takes him in. However, his savior turns out to be some kind of knight on a crusade against evil, and has some pretty peculiar theories about the ways of the same. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the two of them set out under the suspicious eyes of the old man's daughter to rescue women and antique statues, retrieve secret messages from nesting boxes while never running from a fight. However, the actions of the uniformed representatives of the authorities seem to be equally absurd. The microcosmic terrain covered by the heroic duo is an inhospitable, winterly development of concrete tower blocks in Russia. Given the inanimate melancholy which the characters display at times and the special type of humor that results from a combination of dreariness and the grotesque, this film might as well be set in Aki Kaurismäki's Finland. (Berlinale)