The Fool is a film on the inexhaustible subject of Russian corruption that wields its moral truths with the force of a sledgehammer. An ordinary man discovers a crack in the foundation of an old housing project and makes the mistake of trying to save the residents’ lives, upsetting the powers that be by threatening to uncover the tangled web of corruption that led to those conditions. The film opens in the family home of plumber and handyman Dima Nikitin (Artem Bystrov). Dima is trying to raise his stature for his wife and son by learning architecture, despite his mother’s warnings that such a dream is impossible without connections and graft. The dynamic of the family is established early - Dima’s father wants to live quietly and honestly, even if he’s the only one; every day he repairs a bench outside their building and every evening, teens destroy it, and his persistence has made him a local laughingstock. Meanwhile, Dima’s mother berates both father and son for refusing to play by the rules of the game and steal for the good of the family.
Dima takes after his father, as we see when he discovers the nine-story high crack in the apartment building. The other men on the crew want to simply ignore it, as all problems in the building have been ignored for decades, but Dima knows the building could collapse at any minute, killing over 800 residents, and refuses to rest until the proper authorities authorize an evacuation. As fate would have it, all the proper authorities are at the same place, awash in vodka at a party for the mayor. Once Dima interrupts the festivities, the mayor and her department heads meet for an epic session of passing the blame only to realize that it’s more politically expedient for the building to fall than to admit the problem, which there is no money to deal with. Dima doesn’t see until too late that, even with lives at stake, neither the city officials nor the residents of the building want to know the truth, leading to tragic consequences for all involved.
Due to subject and timing, it’s hard not to compare The Fool to Leviathan. Both are excellent films centering on Russian corruption, but they differ in important ways. Leviathan excels in technical bravura and biblical scope, but by invoking the story of Job, it also heaps an almost absurd amount of suffering on one man, almost by chance. By contrast, The Fool digs more realistically into the mechanics of corruption and is much more informative about the nuts and bolts ways that it affects every citizen of this town and makes reform difficult if not impossible (one of the many ironies is how the entrenched corruption has survived the swinging of the political pendulum from communism to capitalism). The film even manages to humanize the corrupt officials, something Leviathan has no interest in, even as they drunkenly (both films are absolutely drowning in vodka) commit horrible acts.
Director Yury Bykov never strays from his message, but he does vary the pace, interspersing more reflective scenes with Dima’s frantic quest. Bystrov gives a strong lead performance, endowing Dima with a combination of naiveté and strength. One minor quibble is that the film loses some momentum in the third act before reaching untold depths of tragic irony in the ending. Make no mistake, The Fool is as bleak and depressing as they come, but it’s also an urgently necessary and morally powerful film.
