House of Fools

By suggesting that the inmates of a psychiatric facility are saner than the “normal” people fighting outside, Andrei Konchalovsky's dark satire on the war in Chechnya strives to be a modern update on Philippe de Broca's 1966 King of Hearts, but House of Fools is a heavy-handed, stylistically shabby piece that falls short of that cult classic by a considerable margin. Set in a Russian hospital on the border with the breakaway region, the film mixes an anti-war message with Fellini-inspired grotesquerie, focusing on the patients caught in the crossfire between the opposing sides, particularly Zhanna (Yuliya Vysotskaya), a fragile, sweetly smiling blonde intended as a Giulietta Masina surrogate (angelic and vulnerable). Zhanna is searching for love amidst the debris, first through a fantasy world in which rocker Bryan Adams sings to her and then in her supposed engagement to a bedraggled Chechen rebel. There's more than a hint of desperation in Konchalovsky's effort to meld the gritty with the luminous, but while the film gets marks for sincerity and good intentions, ultimately it's a disjointed and derivative effort, made more unpleasant by the jerky, handheld camerawork and grainy, bleached-out textures. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)