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A princess (alternatingly played by Ekaterina Dar, Elizaveta Shulyak
and Lilit Karapetyan) only wants to kill herself - but Prince Charming
(Anton Medov) steals the rope she wanted to hang herself with, mostly
because she has to go on a hero's journey (or heroine's journey as she
insists), which is also why she's forbidden to buy a new rope at the
supermarket, as the rope will serve as her journey's macguffin - even if
sometimes it's also her (and all other characters) looking for the ever
elusive trolley or bus line 54, and at times she exchanges
"magical" items with other characters while walking a
countryside made up of dilapitated buildings, ruins and trash dumps,
characters including an evil wizard (Vsevolod Lisoskiy), time traveling
vampire detectives (Andrey Sirobaba, Anbastasiya Popkova), time traveling
werewolf detectives (Varvara Strange, Art Strange), a serialkiller (Victor
Zhdanov) who refuses to kill her because she's the heroine and the movie's
only half finished, an alien (Bogdan Bonchuk) she falls in love with, a
rather unconvincing Centaur (Veronica Vernadskaya), a mermaid (Nu
Simakina), a zombie unicorn (Ekaterina Afirekova), and even the grim
reaper (Magdalena Barbara Tarasova), who insists she's not an hommage to
The Seventh Seal, always followed by a long-armed ghost (Diana
Galimzyanova) only she can see ...A princess (alternatingly played by
Ekaterina Dar, Elizaveta Shulyak and Lilit Karapetyan) only wants to kill
herself - but Prince Charming (Anton Medov) steals the rope she wanted to
hang herself with, mostly because she has to go on a hero's journey (or
heroine's journey as she insists), which is also why she's forbidden to
buy a new rope at the supermarket, as the rope will serve as her journey's
MacGuffin - even if sometimes it's also her (and all other characters)
looking for the ever elusive trolley or bus line 54, and at times she
exchanges "magical" items with other characters taken from
various myths, movies and videogames while walking a countryside made up
of dilapitated buildings, ruins and trash dumps, characters including an
evil wizard (Vsevolod Lisoskiy), time traveling vampire detectives (Andrey
Sirobaba, Anbastasiya Popkova), time traveling werewolf detectives
(Varvara Strange, Art Strange), a serialkiller (Victor Zhdanov) who
refuses to kill her because she's the heroine and the movie's only half
finished, an alien (Bogdan Bonchuk) she falls in love with, a rather
unconvincing Centaur (Veronica Vernadskaya), a mermaid (Nu Simakina), a
zombie unicorn (Ekaterina Afirekova), and even the grim reaper (Magdalena
Barbara Tarasova), who insists she's not an hommage to The
Seventh Seal, always followed by a long-armed ghost (Diana
Galimzyanova) only she can see ...
Now this synopsis does this movie very little justice, as it's
an intentional jumble of characters and tropes from various myths, movies
and videogames, a jumble that, true to the film's tagline "you won't
understand a thing" doesn't make too much sense - and at the same
time makes good fun of storytelling techniques that have regrettably
established themselves in all sorts of mainstream media and dumbed it down
quite a bit, from the by now tired and tiring "hero's journey"
to incredibly high stakes, pointless macguffins to obligatory Easter eggs.
But that said, this film is not some sort of brainheavy meta movie or
anything like that but a pretty mad comedy carried by humour reminiscent
of Monty Python's Flying Circus, held together exactly by
the fact that nothing really holds the story together, and brought to life
clearly in on the joke having the time of their lives. A very unusual film
for sure, but a very worthwhile one.
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