Film
Slapstick 2019: Happiness
- Director
- Aleksandr Medvedkin
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 95 mins
In this 1935 Russian comedy-drama, a hapless loser (with the surname of Loser) undergoes a series of misadventures with avaricious clergy, a tired horse, and a stolen granary (among other things) on his road toward collectivised happiness.
Khmyr is a poor, idle peasant who dreams of becoming a tsar, but who mostly enjoys eating his fill of pork and doing nothing (his idea of happiness). So when his industrious wife Anna, who found real happiness on a collective farm after the Russian revolution, sends Khmyr out in search of happiness, he unfortunately finds his quest is hampered by priests, officials and other freeloaders along the way.
This rare and often hilarious example of socialist slapstick didn’t go down too well with the authorities, who banned it for 40 years because of its anti-Bolshevik humour. But it was championed by none other than Sergei Eisenstein, who remarked: “Today I saw how a Bolshevik laughs.” This Slapstick Festival screening includes the original synchronised score.
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