It was 50 years ago when
The Doors released their second album, “Strange Days,” and the song “People are
Strange” was spun off as a hit single.
The opening stanza went like this:
People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down
Wow! The Doors prophetically described the life
of Natasha (Natalia Pavlenkova) in Russian filmmaker Ivan Tverdovsky’s latest, Zoology.
It will be making its domestic home entertainment
debut on Halloween (yes, Oct. 31) as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings
from Arrow Video — MVD Entertainment Group will be directing the sales and
distribution effort.
Natasha works at a zoo,
lives with her mother and is in her early fifties. Alone.
Unwanted. She’s the butt of jokes
at work — what’s a seven-letter word for Hippo? N,A,T,A,S,H,A … get it.
But then a magical thing
happens, Natasha grows a tail. Yes, a
tail. Ah what the hell, how much worse
can it get … so she flaunts it, spruces herself up and even has a fling with a
younger man, Petya (Dmitri Groshev), who is the X-ray tech responsible for
examining the odd growth.
Tverdovsky has created,
in Zoology,
a social satire on life in Russia. A
country that offers such promise, so many riches, and yet is stuck in some sort
of never ending tale — or is it, tail? — of despair, where “women seem wicked
when you’re unwanted” and church and state doctrine combine to crush the
unorthodox.
This film festival
favorite has pulled in numerous awards for Natalia Pavlenkova’a tour de force performance and Ivan
Tverdovsky’s marvelously quirky tale (er, tail). Zoology is presented in Russian with
English subtitles.
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