Down House / Daun Haus / Даун Хаус (2001) DVD5
on July 2nd, 2016 at 14:28
The name of the film (Даун Хаус) should be comprehensible to non-Russian speakers: "daun" (i.e., "down") is Russian slang for a mentally handicapped person, and "haus" is a Russification of "house", as in house music. The film is a modern adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot – hence the "daun" of the title.
Placing their film in post-Soviet Moscow, Kachanov and Okhlobystin have updated the major characters and actions of Dostoevsky’s novel, while systematically travestying its serious religious and political themes with great doses of absurdism and crude physiological humor. Prince Myshkin (Fedor Bondarchuk), a computer programmer and lover of "house music," returns to his "historic homeland" after being "almost completely cured of a series of nervous illnesses" in the Swiss sanatorium of Dr. Schneider. He falls in with Rogozhin (Ivan Okhlobystin), a pistol-packing new Russian millionaire, a former komsomolka and femme fatale, Nastasya Filippovna, the Ivolgins, Epanchins, and other minor characters familiar from the novel.
DVD5 | PAL 4:3 | 01:19:50 | 3.93 Gb + 3% rec
Language: Russian
Subtitles: English
Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama
Director: Roman Kachanov
Cast: Fedor Bondarchuk, Ivan Okhlobystin, Anna Buklovskaya, Aleksandr Bashirov, Jerzy Stuhr, Juozas Budraitis, Barbara Brylska, Elena Kondulaynen
Country: Russia