The Fool

The Fool (2014) takes place over a single night and follows a plumber in the Russian provinces trying to save a building. Dima works as a plumber by day and studies engineering at night. Called out to a nine storey dormitory block, he sees two cracks running the full height of a wall. He does the arithmetic: the building will collapse before morning. There are eight hundred people inside. What follows is not a heroism story. Dima walks into the mayor's birthday dinner, and it emerges that everyone at the table pocketed the building's maintenance money years ago. Nobody is surprised. The argument that follows is not about whether it will collapse but about who will carry the blame. What Yury Bykov does is refuse to blame the corruption on a few bad men. In the long table scene at the centre of the film everyone has a reason and every reason makes sense. The eight hundred people are simply outside that logic. The title asks exactly this: is the fool the man who insists on doing the right thing, or the people who accept the system as it is. It won four prizes at Locarno, including Best Actor for Artyom Bystrov. It runs 116 minutes. Good for: Russian cinema, social drama, and films about systems. Less good for: it contains domestic violence and alcoholism, the tone is hopeless throughout, and the ending offers nobody any comfort.