Under Electric Clouds

Dir. Aleksei German, Jr. 2015, 138 mins. DCP. In Russian with English subtitles. With Louis Franck, Merab Ninidze, Viktoriya Korotkova, Chulpan Khamatova, Viktor Bugakov, Karim Pakachakov. With this hugely ambitious speculative work, German the younger showed that he inherited his father’s talent for elaborate sequence shots, maneuvering an expansive cast around a melancholic vision of the Russia-to-come, embodied by an unfinished skyscraper that looms over the action. Told through seven vignettes, the film’s disparate characters range from an immigrant laborer from Kyrgyzstan to the daughter of a deceased gangster and a thwarted intellectual reduced to giving palace tours in a hussar outfit. German, Jr.’s take on the not-too-distant future echoes the corruption and injustice of the present with a sympathetic bemusement that recalls Beckett and Fellini.