Cloud-Paradise (1990)
[movie]
It was my birthday recently, so I decided to celebrate by watching something completely offbeat from my backlog. That’s how I ended up with Cloud-Paradise, a tragicomedy (though I prefer the term “dramedy”).
Given the year it came out, I wasn’t expecting much: typical late-Soviet gloom, lots of static mid-shots, dreary dialogue—the usual. But right from the first scene, the film slapped those assumptions clean off my face.
The cinematography is playful, editing punchy, and the dialogue fires off like a machine gun—tight and loaded with wit. Each actor nails their role perfectly. The chemistry among the cast, director, and screenwriter is only amplified by the composer's stellar work. On top of that, the film's songs were actually written by Andrey Zhigalov, the lead actor himself.
This was Zhigalov’s film debut, by the way. Before this, he was a professional clown—and those skills are used to their fullest. But the director goes deeper, revealing Zhigalov’s subtlety as an actor too—delivering a performance that's almost on par with Chaplin or Nikulin.
The setup: a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Sunday. Kolya, a bored young guy with nothing better to do, drifts around town, pestering random passersby with pointless banter. Riding a wave of boredom, he pops into his friends’ place and suddenly blurts out that he’s leaving town. The news shocks his pals, then quickly spreads until the entire village is mobilized to send him off—while Kolya starts regretting his lie more and more.
All this chaos unfolds in a mix of laughter and quiet sadness—the director juggles tone like a damn master. It’s not a cringe-fest, not some clownish farce, and definitely not a preachy moral tale. It’s an aphoristic, bittersweet parable that hits you with wormwood melancholy every couple of minutes. And Dostal packed all that into just 75 minutes. Genius.