Short Stories: 'Entertaining and enlightening'

Directed by Mikhail Segal. Starring Vladislav Leshkevich, Darya Nosik, Andrei Merzlikin. Light House Cinema, 6.15pm *****

A rejected manuscript affects the lives of all who touch it in Mikhail Segal’s flawless feature. This film is based on the director’s award-winning 2011 short, Fastener Solutions, in which a couple map out their lives to spiralling comic, oblique effect with a wedding planner. Its four sections move through discrete genres: comedy, satire, gothic, melodrama. The scenario suggests a British horror mash-up from the 1960s. Some mysterious object enters a group’s life and strange events follow. But Segal has thought his theses through and binds the stories together into a convincingly cohesive whole. There are games and diversions galore.

There’s something of the giddy carnivalesque that characterises Karen Shakhnazarov’s Zero City here, too. And as with that film, serious key themes rapidly emerge: the challenges facing Russia as it continues to interact with the west and late capitalism; the increasing cultural rift between those who remember the Soviet era and the “new Russians”; the issue of corruption. Segal’s light touch permits the socio-political pill to slip down with the greatest of ease. As with many Soviet-era filmmakers (and a few westerners such as Kubrick), the writer-director is an impressive smuggler. Entertaining and enlightening.