The Humorist

Mikhail Idov's film is set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s and covers a week in the life of Boris Arkadiev, an invented stage comedian. Boris is famous: he has been repeating the same routine in every hall for years and that is what everyone knows him for. His trouble runs two ways. On one side there is censorship, with the limits of what he may say drawn in advance and nobody willing to tell him plainly where the line is. On the other there is his own insecurity, which poisons everything between him and his wife, his son and his colleagues. The film does not build him as a wronged artist; it shows how repression shrinks a person and how the person then keeps up the shrinking himself. Alexey Agranovich leads.