The Shock Jock of Russian Letters

Early in Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s first feature film, 4, a man pretending to be Vladimir Putin’s personal bottled-water supplier, a piano tuner (played by the lead singer for the famous Russian rock band Leningrad), and a prostitute who might be the product of a secret Soviet cloning experiment walk into a bar. From there, the 2004 film descends into debauchery and post-socialist grotesque: the insatiable greed of Moscow’s nouveaux riches has led to an illicit meat-selling operation that involves decades-old frozen beef; elsewhere, a group of clones live in abject squalor, the detritus of a failed utopia.