WINDOW TO PARIS
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1995 Ben Hoffman
This is a fairy tale that, despite moments of comedy, illustrates the life in Russia now that the USSR is a thing of the past and everyone is on his own. The current Russia is compared with the outside world ... and vice versa.
In a no-frills apartment house in St. Petersburg an old woman has recently died. A young man who is a music teacher, Nikolai (Sergei Dontsov), rents the room which is part of Gorokhov's (Victor Mikhailov) apartment where he lives with his family. One evening, after a night of drinking, Nikolai and Gorokhov, in a "Through The Looking Glass" scene, discover that behind a closet in Nikolai's room there is a window which leads on to a roof. Climbing down a fire escape ladder, they head for the nearest bar to do more frolicking. Morning reveals to them that they are in Paris. The window that led to the roof, they discover, leads to the rooftops of Paris.
On the Parisian side, an almost similar situation is unraveling. Here lives Nicole (Agnes Sorall) a taxidermist whose skylight faces the same rooftops of St Petersburg. Although Nikolai falls in love with Nicole, the Russians are more in love with the merchandise they are now able to get while Greed takes over.
This could be the greatest deal if it were not that they discover that the magic window closes every twenty years and that date is just about to show up on the calendar. What now?
Director Turi Mamin takes careful aim at both sides of the newly opened world as he shows what we already know: people are people and that is where the world's trouble starts. "Neighbor" means not only someone who lives near you; it also means someone to whom you should be kind and helpful. Director Mamin leaves that small option up to you.
2.5 Bytes 4 Bytes = Absolutely must see. 3 Bytes = Too good to be missed. 2 Bytes = So so. 1 Byte = Save your money.
Ben Hoffman
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews