Daun Haus (2000)
Down House (2000)
DVDRip | MKV | 720 x 576 | x264 @ 1800 Kbps | 79 min | 1,21 Gb
Audio: Russian AAC 5.1 @ 224 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Art-house, Comedy, Crime
DVDRip | MKV | 720 x 576 | x264 @ 1800 Kbps | 79 min | 1,21 Gb
Audio: Russian AAC 5.1 @ 224 Kbps | Subs: English
Genre: Art-house, Comedy, Crime
The plot is set in modern Moscow, probably in the second half of 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 (appeared in film as 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 Russian subcultures like e.g. businessmen, hackers and hippies, heavily using words borrowed from English and transliterated into Russian alphabet.
IMDB
Placing their film in post-Soviet Moscow, Kachanov and Okhlobystin have updated the major characters and actions of Dostoevsky’s novel, while systematically travestying its serious religious and political themes with great doses of absurdism and crude physiological humor. Prince Myshkin (Fedor Bondarchuk), a computer programmer and lover of "house music," returns to his "historic homeland" after being "almost completely cured of a series of nervous illnesses" in the Swiss sanatorium of Dr. Schneider. He falls in with Rogozhin (Ivan Okhlobystin), a pistol-packing new Russian millionaire, a former komsomolka and femme fatale, Nastasya Filippovna (Anna Bulovskaia), the Ivolgins, Epanchins, and other minor characters familiar from the novel. Nastasya Filippovna must choose between three suitors, Ganya, Myshkin, and Rogozhin, while Myshkin is caught in a triangle of his own between Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanshina. The film concludes with Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya Filipovna and the Prince’s relapse into madness. While preserving the bare essentials of Dostoevsky’s plot, Kachanov and Okhlobystin exaggerate the shocking violence and sexual frankness of the original by focusing on sexual dysfunction, bodily functions, masturbation, drug abuse, child abuse, murder, and cannibalism. Aglaya Epanchina (Elena Kotel'nikova) is a punk nymphomaniac, Ferdyshchenko (Aleksandr Bashirov) farts constantly and audibly, General Epanchin (Yuzas Budraitis) tempts Ganya (Mikhail Vladimirov) with railroad cars of Spam, Rogozhin and Myshkin dine on the flesh of the murdered Nastasya Filoppovna, and Myshkin takes a doggy bag home for Ganya. Indeed, Down House begs to be read as a post-Bakhtinian carnivalesque version of The Idiot.
Daun Haus (2000)
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Little remains of Dostoevsky’s "positively good man" in the dancing simpleton of Down House. Where Dostoevsky’s Myshkin appeared to be an idiot because he lived like a true Christian in a hypocritical and corrupt society, Bondarchuk’s Myshkin is unique among the degenerate new Muscovites because he neither drinks nor takes drugs, neither screws nor fights. While the novelistic Myshkin was a visionary, who dreamt of a future Orthodox Christian utopia, the new Russian Myshkin has visions of a futuristic Moscow, reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s anti-utopian Metropolis, and hallucinations in which he is pursued by a bloody dentist before disappearing into a computer-generated desert landscape. If the failure of Dostoevsky’s "Russian Christ" to transform the people with whom he comes into contact is an authentic tragedy, the relapse into madness of the modern Myshkin, after he and Rogozhin have feasted on the murdered Nastasya Filippovna’s leg, is merely an opportunity for the filmmakers to ridicule the naïve and outlandish idea that "beauty will save the world."
Daun Haus (2000)
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On its face, Down House represents a scandalous provocation by young filmmakers eager to show their independence from the Russian intelligentsia’s traditional reverence towards the literary canon. But the choice of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot for parodic treatment suggests other themes at work in Down House. By deflating Dostoevsky and his "Russian Christ," Kachanov and Okhlobystin are attacking the obsessive search for a positive hero that has dominated Russian literature and culture from Gogol and Dostoevsky to Socialist Realism and beyond. A more provocative declaration of independence from the traditional cultural themes and concerns and the messianic self-image of the Russian intelligentsia can hardly be imagined. From this point of view, the sensational success of Vladimir Bortko’s literal and respectful ten-part TV adaptation of The Idiot (2003) can be seen as a predictable conservative reaction to this scandalous and irreverent travesty of Dostoevsky and attack on the Russian intelligentsia.
Daun Haus (2000)
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