A Groom from the Right Society

The head of an institution learns his own death has been declared in the records. A document was issued, signatures were given, the paper was filed. He tries to prove he is alive, and the bureaucracy he himself built will not allow it: if the paper says he is dead, he is dead. The film is not interested in comic plotting. It is interested in paperwork overtaking reality: it mocks Soviet bureaucracy directly and draws its official type recognisably. The form is short and fast: cramped offices, corridors, the sound of stamps and repeated catchphrases. It was Leonid Gaidai's attempt at a first feature. The script was called The Dead Affair and the film was designed at feature length; under pressure from the USSR Minister of Culture Nikolai Mikhailov it was cut heavily for lampooning Soviet reality. What remained was a forty-seven-minute short, and it is the only one of Gaidai's films censored to that degree. Rostislav Plyatt plays the director and Georgiy Vitsin the clerk. Who it is for: viewers curious about Soviet comedy and the history of censorship. Who it is not for: anyone after coherence. Because of the cutting the story stays unfinished and the link between some scenes is broken entirely.