Sunday May 29th 2016, Black and White movie night: Black and White movie night: The Heart of a Dog (Vladimir Bortko, 1988). 136 minutes, in Russian with English subtitles. Door opens at 8pm, film begins at 9pm. Free admission.
The film is set in Moscow not long after the October Revolution where a complaining stray dog looks for food and shelter. A well-off well-known surgeon Phillip Phillippovich Preobrazhensky happens to need a dog and lures the animal to his big home annex practice with a piece of sausage. The dog is named Sharik and well taken care of by the doctor’s maids, but still wonders why he’s there. He finds out too late he’s needed as a test animal: the doctor implants a pituitary gland and testicles of a recently deceased alcoholic and petty criminal Klim Chugunkin into Sharik. Sharik proceeds to become more and more human during the next days. After his transition to human is complete, it turns out that he inherited all the negative traits of the donor – bad manners, aggressiveness, use of profanity, heavy drinking – but still hates cats. He picks for himself the absurd name Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, starts working at the “Moscow Cleansing Department responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds (cats, etc.)” and associating with revolutionaries, who plot to drive Preobrazhensky out of his big apartment. Eventually he turns the life in the professor’s house into a nightmare by stealing money, breaking his furniture, a water ballet during a cat chase and blackmailing into marriage a girl he met at the cinema. The professor with his assistant are then urged to reverse the procedure. Sharikov turns back into a dog. As Sharik he does remember little about what has happened to him but isn’t much concerned about that. To his content he is left to live in the professor’s apartment. […Lees verder]
