The Asthenic Syndrome (1989)

The film adopts the structure of "play in the play", which is about a group of people watching a movie in the cinema, showing a fat woman's mournful memory of her recently deceased husband. She suffered from neurasthenia and depression all her life. When she could not face the pain of the cruel reality, she used sleep as a way to escape, and finally died in a deep sleep. The plot outside the film shows a presenter discussing the history and current situation of the Soviet Union in front of the audience, but the audience is absent-minded and takes advantage of the opportunity to escape one by one, with only one sleeping audience and two rows of uniformed soldiers. The style is quite grotesque and humorous, but there is a trace of sadness and gloom seeping into it, showing a serious Soviet filmmaker's thinking about the current situation of Soviet society: the Soviets even use sleep as a means of avoidance in the face of unsolvable practical problems. at the same time, it also puts forward the realistic helplessness of art films' lack of bosom friends and market in the Soviet Union.