Day of the Full Moon (Dyen polnoluniya, Russia, 1998, 93 minutes)

Winner of a Special Mention FIPRESCI award from a jury of international film critics at the 1998 Karlovy Vary festival, Day of the Full Moon is a stunningly photographed series of vignettes from Russia past and present that summons the spirit of Max Ophuls' 1950 classic La Ronde, Robert Altman's American landmarks Nashville and Short Cuts as well as the time-shifting strategies of Alain Resnais (Mon Oncle d'Amerique, Same Old Song) to tell provocative and interconnecting stories illustrating the waltz of years and whim of memory. In 1948, three people -- a young man, a boy and a waiter -- are captivated during the full moon by a mysterious woman in a lilac dress. Like stones in a pond, the effects of this event ripple through the years, and grow to wash over more than 80 characters, from a disc jockey to a fairy princess to a gangster to Alexander Pushkin to a nostalgic dog. But which of these are dreams, and which represent reality? Director Karen Shakhnazarov continues his career-long focus and the intersection of past and present with this mysterious yet exhilirating mosaic of humankind, which in the end offers both seduction and satisfaction to the receptive viewer.

This picture is an attempt to convey a sensation of life. If you meditate on what our life is, you can regard it as short fragments of scenes, people's faces, often unfamiliar to you, snatches of conversations, fragments of memories. But the chaos has its own logic, some strange connection that is incomprehensible to us. We wanted to express those thoughts on the screen and it is up to you, dear viewers, to judge if we succeeded.

Perhaps the film that has left the most significant impact on the way I see the world is Karen Shakhnazarov’s little known Russian gem Day of the Full Moon,which I caught at the DC Film Festival several years ago.

Basically the movie has no particular plot or story, but rather the camera just weaves in and out of space and time, following the lives of over 70 different persons over the course of a single day in Moscow. The camera begins by following a man as he is going to work in the morning, and the viewer gets a small window into his life. Then at one point he passes an attractive woman in the hallway, glances at her, and suddenly the camera starts following her—we never come back to the first man again. We gain a window into this woman’s world for a few minutes, and then she passes some young boys in a car on the street, and suddenly the camera is off following them.

The film procedes like this for well over 90 minutes, and it’s astounding to see Shakhnazarov’s creativity in the perspectives he chooses to show. A boy is reading a book in his dingy Moscow apartment and suddenly we are transported into the story, and the viewer is transported to the windswept plains of southern Russia in the early 19th century. A woman in Moscow receives a wrong-number phone call from a big-shot Russian mafia boss in Cyprus, and suddenly we are with him and his buddies on a sun-drenched island lounging by a pool. A man is walking along in the deserts of Central Asia and looks up to see a plane flying high above him in the sky, and suddenly we are on that plane, as a Russian business traveler gazes idly down at the steppes from the window. Even these few examples are just the tip of the iceberg.

This film is an amazing experience, unlike anything I have ever seen. (Richard Linklater has done something vaguely similar in his films Slacker and Waking Life, but Shakhnazarov’s film moved me much more deeply than either of these.) It powerfully communicates the ways in which the lives of individual human beings are interconnected in ways we could never dream of, not only in the present but stretching centuries back into the past as well. Another wonderful thing is that a film can do this with no plot and only the sparsest dialogue. One would not even really need to understand Russian to appreciate this film, in my opinion.

So there is no particular moment in this film I could point to as having impacted me, but rather the entire glorious tapestry of the film as a whole. I still sometimes find myself walking down the street, passing a random stranger, and thinking to myself, “What if the camera started following him?” The film has indelibly impressed on me that there are literally billions of stories out there in the world waiting to be told, and I can only ever know the tiniest fraction of them. I can truly say that Shakhnazarov has changed the way I look at the world. It’s a pity this film is so hard to find, as it deserves a much wider audience.

Yeah, we watched Paris, j'etaime without subtitles because our DVD player was screwed up.

I went to see a Moliere play in Paris; 'twas all in French, naturally. It's a play I have seen in English, so I knew the story, but still, following it was a bit of a challenge.

Saw several plays in foreign languages in Tbilisi, including Waiting for Godot done by the Baku Court Theatre from Azerbaijan. I'm not entirely clear on whether they were speaking Azeri or Russian, but nonetheless I didn't understand a word of it. No matter. In good stage acting, one gets the point across with voice and body as much as with words, and these particular actors were phenomenally talented in that respect.

If I recall correctly, it was in Tblisi that David picked up a copy of Day of the Full Moon for me.