HELP GONE MAD

Zhenya – sluggish, naive and somewhat slow on the uptake – leaves his idyllic Belarusian village to work as a labourer in Moscow. He soon gets to know the darker sides of the metropolis that seems so fascinating at first. After being brutally robbed of all his worldly possessions, he finds himself stranded with no idea how to get back to his village. Then a retired engineer comes to the rescue. The elderly man gives Zhenya a bed in his shabby apartment and shares everything with him. All’s well that ends well? Not quite: Zhenya’s new friend has a few peculiarities, and enlists the assistance of the compliant boy in all kinds of strange missions. They plunge headlong into a series of absurd adventures, such as recovering the cryptic messages from a bird’s house, or interpreting why the flap of a garbage container has been mysteriously left open. It is also their duty to save a prospective murder victim: a complete stranger who is slowly being poisoned by her husband – or so they believe. Little do they know that her husband, a police inspector, is no stranger to paranoia either, and lives in permanent dread of the colleagues he believes are out to mob him. And when the engineer’s daughter arrives to visit her father, Zhenya’s life gets even more complicated … HELP GONE MAD, a most bizarre and affectionate comedy about an odd couple, sparkles with curiosity about the madness of everyday life and the day-to-day life of madness. Veering from stoicism to astonishment as he presents his own absurd ideas, Boris Chlebnikov at the same time draws a savage portrait of contemporary Russia in all its glaring contradictions and unfathomable depths.