User Reviews

I've heard it said that a person has to be Russian to appreciate this film fully. I'm not sure -- I'm not Russian myself, but it didn't stop me from finding it a genial, lighthearted, and thoroughly entertaining film, as time spent in nature with a bunch of fun guys and a good supply of drink should be. As this is clearly the movie's highest goal, it seems to succeed with a kind of extra relish.

It's interesting that while part of the device is that we see how different and less glamorous the reality of "the national hunt" hunt his from a Finn's imagination of its eighteen-sixties-ish equivalent, this is as much as anything a way into a kind of sentimental ironic nationalism that glows behind the comedy. We may be humorously unlike the romantic picture of Russia, it seems to say, but we're unlike it in these irreducibly characteristic and lovable ways. Having a foreigner along the whole time highlights both this and the comedy.

So the title, I think, is less ironic than it might seem. But the main thing is the spirit of fun that pervades it, and the fact that it's episodic nature allows for plenty of enjoyable gags and sequences.

After having seen the film Kukushka from Alexander Rogozhkin, where I at least could understand one protagonist speaking Finnish language and finding the story and the idea superb, especially as I only understood only one parts speaking and was forced to try to interprete the other ones, as they did or did not among each other I felt very animated to think over the meaning of spoken word as vessel for communikation compared to visual signals and even emotional antenna. And as I now looked the Peculiarities of National Hunting from A.R. and could not understand anything of the spoken I was so amused about the happening and about the anarchism I felt all the time speaking to me as message of the film. It reminded me of the pictures I created when reading books from Bulgakow where I understood the language (as translated into finnish)but giving me a feeling of getting my chains broken which hold me to "normality" and to escape them for a while.

I felt very free when amusing myself with the Hunting without understanding nothing of the spoken but letting things happen, no matter how crazy and switching my cortex off. I thank my friend and great artist in painting, Viktor Shtivelberg, who gave me the opportunity to learn to know the works of Alexaner Rogozhkin, and I hope a lot of people would see these movies; I will do my best to give the message to others!