Directed by Kira Muratova • 1989 • Ukraine, Soviet Union
Starring Olga Antonova, Sergei Popov, Galina Zakhurdayeva
Widely considered Kira Muratova’s masterpiece, THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME is also Soviet cinema’s grand avant-comic opus, a deconstructive portrait of the nation in the final, frenzied stages of the communist experiment. For its first forty minutes, shot in black and white, SYNDROME tells the story of a grieving widow (Olga Antonova) at wit’s end, lashing out at strangers on the street, impulsively quitting her nursing job, and sleeping with random men. Cut to a disastrous post-screening Q&A with Antonova: we’ve just watched a film-within-a-film as slept through by Nikolai (Sergei Popov, one of Muratova’s co-screenwriters), a narcoleptic schoolteacher whose subsequent wanderings lead to encounters (between sudden naps) with an expansive cross section of the failing Soviet Union’s beleaguered citizenry—digressive vignettes at once bizarre, disturbing, and hilarious. Deftly applying dizzying metafiction to her inimitable brand of humanistic farce, THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME is an ingenious fractal puzzle that captures the delirious death throes of an entire epoch.
Up Next in Directed by Kira Muratova
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The Tuner
Directed by Kira Muratova • 2004 • Russia, Ukraine
Starring Alla Demidova, Nina Ruslanova, Renata LitvinovaAdapted from selected stories by Arkady Koshko, THE TUNER is Kira Muratova’s pitch-black con-artist comedy as well as a veritable masterclass in slow-burn unpredictability Capitalizing on ...
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Change of Fate
Directed by Kira Muratova • 1987 • Ukraine, Soviet Union
Starring Natalya Leble, Yuriy Shlykov, Vladimir KarasyovKira Muratova’s typically idiosyncratic adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s play “The Letter” unfolds in an outpost in colonial Asia where Maria (Natalya Leble, in a role most famous...
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Three Stories
Directed by Kira Muratova • 1997 • Russia, Ukraine
Starring Sergey Makovetskiy, Renata Litvinova, Oleg TabakovIn Kira Muratova’s darkly ironic triptych, three seemingly unlikely people are driven to murder—shocking acts of violence rendered by the director as a kind of monstrous comedy of the a...
