12 Chairs

A comedy set in the Soviet Union. After the revolution a woman confesses something on her deathbed. She sewed the family jewels into the upholstery of a chair. The chair was part of a set of twelve. The set was taken by the state and dispersed. Her son-in-law Vorobyaninov goes after it. He meets a man on the way. Ostap Bender is a swindler, quick with an answer, and has no occupation at all. They go into partnership. Ostap names his share up front. From there the film is a story of searching. The chairs are scattered across the country and each is somewhere else. In a theatre, at an auction, on a steamer, in a chess club. Every stop is its own scene. The narrative moves episode by episode and each episode has a new swindle. The chess section is the best known. Ostap, who cannot play at all, is received in a small town as a grandmaster and gives a lecture. There is a rival too. A priest has learned the same secret and is also looking for the chairs. What the narrative is interested in is not treasure but a system: all its humour wanders through the institutions, cooperatives and officials of a newly founded state. The ending is bitter. The result of the search is something none of the searchers allowed for. The source is Ilf and Petrov's novel, one of the most quoted books in Soviet literature. The same novel was adapted in America at almost the same time; Mel Brooks's version had come out a year earlier. Ostap is played by the Georgian actor Archil Gomiashvili. Archil Gomiashvili, Sergei Filippov, Mikhail Pugovkin and Natalya Krachkovskaya are in the cast. Leonid Gaidai directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Soviet comedy and picaresque narratives that move episode by episode. Who it is not for: anyone without the context; most of the jokes rest on the institutions and idioms of the period.