This film has not yet been reviewed. Check back later for the complete review here on FilmThreat.com. Synopsis: Slip-sliding between dream and reality, Lubov and Other Nighmares is a sexy, intellectually delicious, and darkly playful poetic treatise on the technological anxieties and general disorientation surrounding the reinvention of post-Communist, post-postmodern, “post-everything” Russia.
Alex is a young filmmaker who is seeing a dream. There is his mother, a string of lovers, and a girl called “Programme” with which he is developing a computer program to scan and digitize dreams to make them real. Life itself becomes very real when he nearly escapes the vengeance of the businessman husband of his lover, only to be nearly shot by a hit man hired to kill the husband. The hit man turns out to be a saucy woman named Lubov who has been in and out of correctional institutions for most of her adult life. Alex and Lubov begin an unlikely affair, even as she maintains a lesbian lover in prison. But when Alex’s computer dream project bears fruit, he travels to the West for another affair, this time in a rich country where Alex’s “dream-art” is appreciated. Everything seems to go Alex’s way, but nightmares of Lubov and his poor country will not let him go.
Using an eclectic rush of computer-generated images, Super 8 footage, and luscious 35mm images of St. Petersberg, Andrei Nekrasov crafts a dense and brilliantly fractured story narrative and portrait of the city. Lubov and Other Nightmares is rock candy that, if patiently savored, will provide pleasure for a long time.
