Elections Day

A small radio station in Moscow. One morning the staff learn that the owner has got mixed up in a governor's election and will be putting up his own candidate. The team is assigned: they will run the campaign. The candidate is not ready; he does not understand the work, cannot speak, and is not meant to win either. The real aim is to split another candidate's vote. The team boards a boat and campaigns along the Volga. At every stop a new problem appears: local bosses, rival teams, a candidate who goes missing and a programme nobody takes seriously. Oleg Fomin directs. Leonid Barats, Rostislav Khait, Aleksandr Demidov and Kamil Larin are in the cast. It is a Russian production. The film was adapted from a stage play by the theatre company Kvartet I and the actors perform a text they wrote themselves. Its form is in pieces; the events proceed stop by stop and each section builds its own joke. The matter it treats is election engineering; the film is about splitting a vote rather than gathering one. The humour rests on talk and the density of lines is high; there is little visual comedy. The film worked in Russia and a sequel was made. The narrative shows no side as clean; the people running the campaign know what the work is. Its limit is accessibility; the jokes depend on Russian politics and the language of the period, and most of it is lost in translation. Who it is for: viewers who like Russian comedy and political satire. Who it is not for: it is episodic, local, and the ending scattered.