4 (2005)

Night in Moscow. An ominous, spider-like machine chases a pair of starving dogs into flight. In an anonymous night bar, three strangers cross paths: meat merchant Oleg, prostitute Marina, and piano tuner "simply Volodya." They are served by a narcoleptic bartender, three plus one is four, while each entertains the others with invented biographies and bizarre stories about their lives and careers. Oleg claims to work for President Putin's administration, supplying him with bottled water and his wife with liquor. Marina passes herself off as a marketing executive. And Volodyya, the infamous singer of the rock group Leningrad, presents himself as a geneticist who clones twins in a laboratory, two times two is four again, a laboratory that has been engaged in these experiments since the days of Stalin. What begins as a game of tall tales and absurd fantasies, about the president's alcohol abuse, a Japanese wave machine that makes people more productive, and a genetic project through which every Russian has by now been cloned four times, gradually takes on a more disturbing charge. After they part ways, these fantasy realities, especially Volodya's, begin to take over their everyday lives.