Down House | |
---|---|
Russian | Даун Хаус |
Directed by | Roman Kachanov |
Written by | Roman Kachanov Ivan Okhlobystin |
Starring |
Fyodor Bondarchuk Juozas Budraitis Ivan Okhlobystin Stanislav Duzhnikov Aleksei Panin Mikhail Petrovsky Mikhail Vladimirov Jerzy Stuhr Barbara Brylska Artemy Troitsky Elena Kondulainen Aleksandr Bashirov Olga Budina |
Release date |
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Running time | 89 minutes |
Country | Russia |
Language | Russian |
Down House ( Russian: Даун Хаус, romanized: Daun khaus) is a 2001 Russian comedy- gross-out film by Roman Kachanov, a modern interpretation of the 1869 novel The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [1] [2]
The film received the Special Jury Prize at Kinotavr. [3]
The plot is set in modern Moscow, probably in the second half of the 1990s, with " New Russians", Hummer H1 jeeps, bribery, violence, truckfuls of tinned stew as a dowry, and so on. The film is quite far from the novel's subject, but still keeps to the main storyline. It features Fyodor Bondarchuk as Myshkin, and a soundtrack by DJ Groove, one of the most popular Russian DJs (who appears in the film as a taxi driver).
In Russian, Даун (Down) primarily refers to a person with Down syndrome, or, colloquially, to anyone retarded or just stupid, so it is similar to Idiot; while Хаус (House) refers to House music, which is used extensively in the film. The name is also a reference to the tendency of Russian subcultures such as businessmen, hackers and hippies to make heavy use of words borrowed from English and transliterated into the Russian alphabet.