Here is a revival of a 1983 film from the Georgian director Eldar Shengelaia (still alive at 90) and it is revealed as an intriguing, and perhaps even remarkable creation: a dapper, droll satire on Soviet bureaucracy, a shaggy dog story of absurd humour that creeps up on you, culminating in a truly bizarre apocalypse. The satire was arguably lenient enough to get the film made and lenient enough to win it the USSR State prize, but we can see from our 2023 vantage point that it is a deadpan prophecy of the Soviet Union’s imminent collapse. If we could go back in time to this film’s first release and tell Shengelaia that just six years later the Berlin Wall would come down and with it the entire Soviet system, would he have been surprised? Perhaps only about the fact that it was going to take so long.
The scene is a state publishing company that also supervises printing and takes delivery of noisome chemicals in its basement courtyard. A would-be writer called Soso (Ramaz Giorgobiani) is scurrying about the building, desperately trying to interest its harassed or indolent functionaries in his novel, entitled Tian Shan, or The Blue Mountains – and therefore, we must assume, literally or metaphorically about the central Asian mountain ranges, although no one ever asks him about it or discusses literary matters in any way. No one definitively rejects him or accepts him. He is always referred to someone else.
A sad, lonely man called Markscheider (Ivane Sakvarelidze), wearing a belted mac and hat like Peter Cook’s EL Wisty, is also hanging about, trying to interest people in his allegorical fables. Markscheider manages to fix the office’s broken lift – it is only when they are stranded in the frequently immobile lift that executives read manuscripts – and someone comes close to offering him a job through sheer gratitude. But not to publishing him. Another grumpy official rages at the fact that a painting of Greenland’s frozen landscape, insecurely tacked up over his desk, may come crashing down at any moment and kill him, but he cannot get the bureaucratic authority to remove it.
This painting is, in fact, all he cares about; he certainly doesn’t care about literature, but then no one else does either. Another apparatchik is obsessed with the games of motorbike polo happening outside the building, and many employees spend their time gazing poignantly out of the window at the city in all its purposeful busy-ness, so different from their own near-coma of inactivity. And all the time the cracks in the walls are getting worse. It leads to an uproarious climax, delivered in the same elegantly inscrutable style as the rest of the comedy. What an intriguing and brilliant insight into the late Soviet mindset.