Konchalovsky returned to post-Soviet Russia after a drawn-out sojourn in the West, and not a moment too soon, as by that stage he had sunk to directing Stallone and Russell in Tango & Cash. Here, he completes the circle by revisiting the village of Bezvodnoye, the scene of Asya's Happiness, which was banned by the authorities for 20 years for its less than paradisiac perspective on life in Soviet society.Absence has not made the heart grow fonder. In a blackly satirical dissection of the collision of the capitalist juggernaut with a way of life that the main protagonist, a firebrand peasant also named Asya, describes as being unchanged for a millennium, no stratum of society really escapes unscathed. There's little of the warmth of, say, Kusturica's broadly sketched yokels and opportunists: it's all too close to the bone. Konchalovsky has again used a mostly amateur cast of locals, but now one wonders if they realised what a hatchet job was being done on them. Russia's peasantry are depicted as a gullible, vindictively reactionary mob, ready to follow anyone who'll ply them with enough vodka, and the officials as amorally corrupt. And in the world beyond there are only gangsters.
Konchalovsky occasionally seems to sense that something's not right in the mix, and inserts a moment of comic mania out of the blue, such as a stop-motion chase scene, or Asya's chicken talking back to her, but these feel forced amidst the overall nihilism of the scenario.
5/10
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