Pretty Good

Brilliant and touching

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Best movie for me. We even watched it today at our Christian cinema event in Sofia. Thanks for that amazing movie. Hope it will have some positive effect/change the live at least in part of the people who watch The fool (Durak in Russian). even though this might be naive...but what to do - I am Durak. We made a 40 min discussion on each of the roles. It reveals us from deep who we are. Corruption and life? This shows best the broken societies we live in. The excuses we all do to satisfy ourselves with an answer that may excuse our egoism. Amazing scenario and actors. Dima never talked for God / Christ. But he just lives His word. But What metaphor is the block in your life? It's too deep...I can't express all the things we discussed now...but really worth watching it and doing a discussion on it with some priest or Ph.D. in Christinity as we did.

The 2 questions I came away with after watching this extraordinary movie were, does this kind of thing really happen in Russia, and is this really what Russia is like? I contacted my only Russian acquaintance about this, and he said the movie is an accurate, though exaggerated, depiction of small-town Russia. I was curious about his comment about the movie taking place in a small town; Russians live in massive apartment buildings in small towns? In fact not a whole lot about this film is small-townish, at least to this Canadian outsider. It feels like an urban nightmare, mostly taking place in or around this huge apartment building teeming with people, at a restaurant that's teeming with people as well - because the local government is throwing a big party for themselves - or along built-up streets. The most glaring indication that the setting is indeed a small town is when the government heads all get together in a small room to discuss an emergency situation, and we are introduced to an unsavoury ragtag assortment of drunken schemers who happen to have absolute control over the local population. There is nothing urbane about these people. It's made clear in The Fool, however, that this fiefdom's evilness is partly the result of trickle-down evilness from the federal level, and there's an underlying despondency among some of the local government officials as they seemingly have no other choice but to be corrupt. So you do get glimpses of decency and humanity within the fiefdom. But how can decency and humanity win amidst the corrupt, cutthroat, dog-eat-dog reality in modern Russia from the top down to the bottom. The Fool is a tale of flowers that attempt to grow in sewage, and what happens to them, and it is the tale of how people as individuals are affected when evil reigns. Some become evil themselves, some try to resist evil entirely, but mostly The Fool is a story about people just trying to do the best they can for themselves and their families, and be happy despite overwhelming odds, and despite hopelessness all around them.

First of all, this movie is authentic. It depicts with great detail and credibility the rotten face of communism in Russia today, even thou it could take place in any of the ex USSR countries. Even old democracies are not strange to corruption, but the scale and implications in less democratic states is way bigger. The story is great and it unfolds at a steady pace, characters are wisely chosen, all of them, living their own complicated drama and acting accordingly. But it's more than that. In my eyes, this movie felt, not only perfect in every way, but it also had a lot of human nature in it. You must watch this movie, it truly is a masterpiece.

Yuri Bykov's "Durak" ("The Fool" in English) looks as the current state of affairs in Russia. This story of a plumber facing an intractable bureaucracy when he tries to draw people's attention to a precarious apartment building is merely one look into an oligarchic society that's seen little infrastructural and political advancement since the Soviet collapse. Indeed, the city government seems as hopeless as the private citizens. The truth is, none of this should come as a surprise. Boris Yeltsin turned Russia into a kleptocracy. Vladimir Putin stabilized the economy but restored the Soviet-era authoritarianism. Corruption has dominated the country ever since the USSR collapsed (and was certainly widespread in Soviet times)."The Fool" is mostly an indictment of Putin's Russia, but can be seen as an indictment of any society in which corruption is so ingrained that the citizens practically accept it. Worth seeing.