Natalya Buzko

Widely considered Kira Muratova’s masterpiece, THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME is also Soviet cinema’s grand avant-comic opus, a deconstructive portrait of the nation in the final, frenzied stages of the communist experiment. For its first forty minutes, shot in black and white, SYNDROME tells the story of a grieving widow (Olga Antonova) at wit’s end, lashing out at strangers on the street, impulsively quitting her nursing job, and sleeping with random men. Cut to a disastrous post-screening Q&A with Antonova: we’ve just watched a film-within-a-film as slept through by Nikolai (Sergei Popov, one of Muratova’s co-screenwriters), a narcoleptic schoolteacher whose subsequent wanderings lead to encounters (between sudden naps) with an expansive cross section of the failing Soviet Union’s beleaguered citizenry—digressive vignettes at once bizarre, disturbing, and hilarious. Deftly applying dizzying metafiction to her inimitable brand of humanistic farce, THE ASTHENIC SYNDROME is an ingenious fractal puzzle that captures the delirious death throes of an entire epoch.