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House of Fools More at IMDbPro »Dom durakov (original title)

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31 reviews in total

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22 out of 27 people found the following review useful:
Masterpiece!, 25 May 2004

Author: Yuri Belov (ybelov@pc.nu) from Tampere (Finland)

I saw this film yesterday and I'm still under the impression. It was overwhelming. All is brilliant -- plot, acting, images, music...

Certainly, there are motifs from other films -- "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (for example, the episode when the inmate break out of the asylum), "Dancer in the Dark" (the dreams of Janna) -- but they are organically interwoven in the canvass of Konchalovsky's film.

This oeuvre, like other films by Andrei Konchalovsky, is a result of a happy amalgamation, a synthesis of Western and Russian cinema traditions, which does not happen often.

The film is profoundly artistic and at the same time realistic. This is achieved not least by a careful choice of details. For example, in the background, in the TV screen, you see Boris Yeltsin, the Russian ex-President who started this dirty war, and his corrupt Minister of Defence Pavel Grachov ("Pasha Mercedes").

The verbal language is also true to life. The personages, in particular the Russian military, use quite a few of Russian 'four-letter words', and here the use of such words is fully justified.

I saw the films in a DVD edition (Paramount Classics, 2003) and the only disappointment was the subtitles. The English translation is sometimes too inexact and leaves too much dialogue untranslated. This needs to be corrected in the subsequent edition.

Of course, the best is to see the film in Russian. But even if you do not speak Russian, try to see this film, because it is a masterpiece of a universal value, which transcends the language barriers. Watch it with an open mind.

I wish that all Russians had the chance too see 'The House of Fools'. Then, probably, their perception of the Chechen people would change for the better, and it would also bring them to a reflection about the war in the Caucasus, which is both Russia's crime and illness, and how the country could overcome it.

Thank you Mr. Konchalovsky, thank you all who made this excellent film! 10/10

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16 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
thought provoking and overlooked, 24 May 2003
Author: D. Packard (oogila@webtv.com) from United States

For some I can't stop thinking about this little gem of a movie, it has more heart and soul than most of an entire decade of mainstream films combined. Konchalovsky is an interesting director, certainly when you think at the wide range of his work (Runaway Train, Shy People). I was somewhat fascinated and semi-perplexed when I first saw this, but the more I tried to peg it down ("ok this is the Russian Cookoo's Nest--with some 'I Never Promised you a Rose Garden' mixed in") the less it became so. This is an original one of a kind film, highly underrated, highly overlooked, especially in this country. Which is too bad, the rest of the sleepwalking brainwashed masses can flock to see their "Bruce Almighty's or Matrix Reloaded's every week, I'm glad I'm aware of films like this.

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12 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
It's like a poem, 26 November 2004
Author: Abadeo from Texas

I love this movie. The third time I watched it, it made me laugh and it made me cry. I know that a lot of people are not going to like this movie. It's like a poem.... you get it or you don't. People complain about the Bryan Adams segments. I thought they were too few and not long enough. They were Zhanna's dreams.... her escape. And after you feel Janna's frustration, unhappiness, and pain you welcome the relief and warm colors of the Bryan Adams escape from reality. The movie has some very surreal scenes. One of them is the scene where Zhanna is looking at her wedding pictures in her room while the Chechen sniper is shooting out her window. Yuliya Vysotskaya is wonderful as Zhanna. Her face is so child-like and expressive. She doesn't even need to speak; I can read her mind in her face. She's a really great actor. I love the scene where she discovers Ahmed in front of her in the lunch line. She says nothing, but her face changes several times, showing some strong emotions that you cannot understand unless you've seen the entire movie up to that point. Zhanna has some funny little quirks, like the way she steps over every doorway threshold. But I thought it odd that I didn't laugh or cry until the third viewing. The first time, I was just in awe. I was just wide eyed with amazement.

But by the third time I loved and understood the characters, especially Zhanna, and so I could feel the movie.

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6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
good film, 26 June 2004
Author: brianh-9 from Mississippi

Clearly this film is a different perspective on the damaging effect of war..just from a totally unique point of view. The patients of a psychiatric ward are roaming free in a war raging country around them. They are all held under a sort of captivity by one of the war's opposing sides. The doctor of the ward went to get a bus for the patients, but had no one to look after them. One patient, in particular, is focused on. This is a woman who is in love with Bryan Adams(the singer)and believes they are engaged and fantasizes about him. In the dream world of this woman, all the patients are riding a train with Adams as a special sort of guest riding with them. She soon meets a soldier who is with the little regime that is forting themselves at the mental hospital. The film is about the effects of war on the soldiers. They are mostly scared and worried people. They are confused about the reasoning of war and the lines drawn between both sides. Take a certain meeting two commanders have considering a fallen comrade brought to the one commander forting at the ward. They know each other and if things were different would probably be friends. The one with the body asks for cash to return the fallen comrade, but decides that he will give the body back when he learns that the other commander saved his life once. The film has powerful scenes like one where the soldiers are leaving the "fort" of the hospital. Our Bryan Adams lover wants to be with the soldier. He leaves with his regime and she can't take her eyes away for the pain that she bares. A helicopter crashes behind her..blowing her hat off her head. This scene is even more spellbinding for she never even noticed what happened behind her because she was watching a man she loved leaving. The film has many moments with the characters in the menatl hospital committing the strange acts that unfortunate mental retardents often make. The film doesn't mock them, but makes them a supplemental feature to the war around them. I saw this as a way of saying that these people with mental setbacks may be lucky for not understanding the acts that are taking place. Their lives are effected, but mentally they don't have to deal with the war on a moral standpoint. The soldiers, on the other hand, have the moral and consequencial decisions in their mind every second. ****/*****

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7 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
NOT the Russian One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest., 16 February 2004

Author: Michael DeZubiria (miked32@hotmail.com) from Luoyang, China

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a great movie that was based on an even greater book, but I wish people wouldn't compare this movie to that one so often. Yes, the similarities are extensive and impossible to miss, but House of Fools, as the title translates into English, is a different film that has it's own weight and it's own meanings. This is not, by any means whatsoever, another vision of Ken Kesey's classic, nor is it a remake in any way of that of Milos Forman.

(spoilers) Yuliya Vysotskaya, who played Janna, the main character, delivers a wonderful performance of this woman who lives in a mental hospital right on the Russian border during the Chechen War (a war about which I admittedly know absolutely nothing). Her ailment is never made clear (nor are any of the others), except for a scene in the middle of the movie where she reveals, through dialogue, some of what are probably many more illusions (I won't count her illusory belief that she can dance). As she is being abandoned by Ahmed, who she thinks is the love of her life, she tells him that she loves him, and asks him to please don't kill her. Then she tells the mud that she loves it, and please don't kill her, etc.

Her mental condition is not important, although her character, while skillfully performed, is so laden with a cloying freight of symbolism that it often becomes difficult to see her as a person rather than a heavily symbolic character in a heavily symbolic movie. There is a common misconception (supported by the movie's very own tagline) that the doctors at the mental hospital around which the story revolved abandoned the patients, leaving them to fend for themselves during the Chechen War during which the movie takes place. I don't really understand this assertion, since the doctor returns at the end of the film, explains what happened to him when he went to find a bus to transfer the patients to a better hospital. Just the fact that he returned should have been enough to show that he didn't simply ditch them all.

I wish I had a better memory for the names of the characters in the movie, because one of the other patients, the one with the wraparound glasses and the backpack full of his poetry, played a significant role in the movie. He and Janna are clearly the mother and father figures for the rest of the patients when they are left to their own devices, seeing over the rest of the cast and, periodically, offering the chance for audience members to question the validity of their respective mental instabilities. I don't know much about mental disorders, but there were certainly scenes in this movie where it seemed to me that they were being treated for more mental instability than they regularly displayed. These were balanced out, however, by scenes where they each displayed rather crippling disabilities, his the complete inability to communicate or assess situations effectively, and hers some dangerous attachment issues and the displacement of emotions onto things like inanimate objects.

As far as the war goes, I won't go into detail about the meaning of the war itself in the film because, like I mentioned above, I know nothing about the war that is going on offscreen, but the movie makes some interesting points about the chaos and destructiveness of war. One of them is the almost-cliché of the man who saves another man's life, only to find himself fighting on the opposite side from him later on. Sort of a cliché by now, yes, but it adds to the movie's later concentration on the chaos and confusion surrounding war in general. There are several scenes in which the mental patients are understandably terrified and utterly lost as to what is going on around them. This is to be expected, but there are also several scenes in which the soldiers and even their commanders are pretty confused as to what is happening. One tense scene has two opposing factions facing each other (notably making an illicit drug deal), when one of the soldiers carelessly stumbles on his gun, making it fire off a few rounds into the air, which leads to the two groups firing machine guns at each other for several seconds before anyone realizes that it was all just a stupid mistake. The soldier who accidentally caused it laughs it off.

The references to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are everywhere. The patients are left to their own devices (in this case because the doctor left longer than intended because he was delayed by the war, in the other case because McMurphy persuaded them all to escape for a while), which has a healing effect on all of them but not enough to make any of them want to leave the hospital, their home, at the end of the film. There's an interesting element of the movie involving Bryan Adams, who literally colors Janna's life with his music, even though she has a completely delusional relationship with him, which would seem to have a detrimental effect on her mental health. What I see by his occasional entrances into the movie are not some weak effort to provide recognizance by inserting an American pop star, but a layered effect of meaning that reflects the many other layers of meaning in the film. Bryan Adams, while he is not meant to have had a real relationship with this woman who thinks that she is engaged to him, lights up her life with his music (notice how the color fills the screen when it's playing), while she attempts to do the same for the rest of the patients with her own accordion playing. She doesn't always succeed with all of them, but she certainly does much more than she does with the soldiers, who she also plays for on more than one occasion, and is laughed at each time (which may very well signify some kind of juvenile cynicism among the lower ranks of military forces).

I don't pretend to understand every level of symbolism that is portrayed in this movie, but it's important to notice that they're there. It's amazing how much more meaning and importance some little movie from Russia like this has than the typical multi-million dollar blockbuster released here in America, and I really wish that people would pay at least a tiny bit more attention to the few movies released (dare I say the majority of which come from other countries?) that actually mean something. There are a lot of things in this movie that are difficult to comprehend, indeed, many which seem to be in the movie as examples of pure artistic expression, but the movie as a whole, like it's main character, is so laden with meaning and symbolism that it is virtually impossible to see it all on just one viewing. The movie deserves at LEAST that much.

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Russians still can do it!, 21 July 2007

Author: trile from Serbia and Montenegro

Elementary basics in film art school - old Russian movies. Maybe not something for ordinary man, but this is the picture on both sides. It's amazing how amongst everyday blockbuster clones this brilliant piece slipped in. Get everybody's attention and make them watch it.

The only thing I want to concentrate here is the difference between American and Russian mind. U.S. had lost the war in 'Nam but there are billion movies about successes and victories; today after the 9/11 patriotic element is in every, but every movie, whether it is political or not, and on the other side you have guys like Clooney who create opposite thing like in Syriana. They call it 'the truth' but many claim he is traitor. But this is not a political disscusion. The thing I want to point out is that Konchalovsky stays in the middle. Checheny is big thing for Russia, but he is political in a way it becomes apolitical movie, because common man is after all apolitical - too small to apprehend borders, power, money and war! Bravo!

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6 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Excellent movie; befitting our time, 15 July 2006

Author: sunman88 from United States

I watched this movie on 7/14/06 with the Middle east ablaze and the Bush Administration still spouting their tired nonsense about democracy while Palestinians are slaughtered by the scores. Folks, the only language we, homosapiens, understand is force. Northern Ireland, Palestine, Chechnya and on and on. Might makes right and the rest is fluff. The movie is not so much, at least I don't think so, a commentary on the war on Chechnya as much as it is on human follies. For those of us who have known the wrath of a woman the scene after the newly-wed husband leaves and she stabs his pictures with a broken glass is so frontal-lobe. And then the silence when he returns! A master piece indeed! Perhaps the moral of the story is that might IS right and love insane! Enjoy.

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4 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Ingusetia borderland, 25 September 2006
Author: Cristi_Ciopron from CGSM, Soseaua Nationala 49

A hospital near a monorail.A merciless war.The soldiers' grimness.The psychiatrist left his "psihushka" to seek means of securing his patients.The clinic is taken over alternatively by Chechens and by Russians,and made over into a battle scene.

The mad people:some are grovelling,others are grumpy,others grinning, contentious, fractious, petulant,forlorn, babyish,foul, fossils of disease.

The Chechen soldiers are portly,while some of the young ones are very handsome.

My favorite scene is the Chechens' song:heart-breaking and manly.It also offers a sample of the beauty and musical valences of that Oriental language.One of the best musical moments in cinema's history.

"Dom ..." is made of suavity and infinite tenderness.The story is limber.In depth,this flick about an amorous insane woman is a parable about the ambiguity of life.The score is a profusion of beauty and Oriental privacy.

Mrs. Vysotskaya is amazing as "Jana";the rest of the cast is first-class.

Visually,the movie is not as beautiful as many Russian movies are (e.g.,Utomlyonnye Solntsem).The photography is deliberately made to look like that of a documentary.The hospital is not grisly;"Dom Durakov" is not about madness in a clinical sense,nor war,nor love,for what love could be that;it is about the ambiguity of life,about the hidden infinite suavity.The hospital itself is a parable.It is a clinic of parable and symbol,not one of cruel naturalism.The aesthetics is one of insobriety,extravagance,fancy and powerful exuberance.

"Dom ..." features a pleasurable and plain cosmopolitanism:Adams and Chechen songs.

Konchalovsky is back in high form,with this work of contemplation and insight.

Tocilescu,the Romanian director,praised to the skies this film's richness.

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6 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
House of Fools, 27 May 2005

Author: sherlock von einstein from owensboro, ky

Russian film. Set during the Siberian liberation effort of the mid 1990's. A rebel army seizes a mental institution, believing that it has been abandoned. Lots of interesting characters, including a woman who believes that Canadian pop singer Bryan Adams is her fiancé. Adams has a small reoccurring role during her fantasy sequences. The best way I can describe this film is to imagine the third act of "28 days later…" where the protagonists are taken in by the army post, yet replace all those zombies with very likable mental patients. It's also filmed on digital so it has a similar look to "28 days later…" This film is notable for its stark realism (i.e., natural acting and believable characters and situations). The music plays a vital role too, and is often used to break away from "the suspended disbelief," or I should say that it's used to call to attention that we are only watching a movie. I know that contradicts what i just said about the stark realism. I guess this film is bi-polar, which is for an obvious reason.

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2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Put Me On That Train!, 16 June 2003
Author: Charles (CharlesInCal@excite.com) from San Diego, California

What beautiful imagery capturing the essence of a cold dark night where the silence is suddenly broken by a view of a most enigmatic train - like a Christmas tree decked out in its finest. War as seen through the eyes of Janna, a beautiful woman who is madly in love. And we do mean madly! You see, Janna is a Chechen inmate at an isolated psychiatric hospital, where her only peace lies in her accordian and her dreams of being rescued by her imaginary fiance, Canadian superstar Bryan Adams at the controls of that train. What is that train? And who is that man with the apple? Is he God speaking to mankind? Is that train the Train of Redemption taking every child, man, and woman who has suffered and leaving behind others in a world full of all the things we detest?

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