Event

(4) Four

Three strangers meet in a Moscow bar one late night and spin fantastic stories, all of them lies. They depart and journey their separate ways through an apocalyptic landscape of modern industrial horrors. A completely unique and disturbing film, 4 was held up by Russian censors who wanted 40 minutes cut, but relented after the film won acclaim at film festivals around the world. The number 4 appears in many guises and links the often disparate events: the four dogs of the opening scene, the four drills that scare them away, the four snow removal trucks, the four people in the bar's opening sequence (counting the sleeping bartender), the "four" that results from the cloning of twins, the four round [cloned] piglets and the four dolls with faces made from chewed bread that survive the death of one of four sisters. Like virtually everyone else in the film, the "three sisters" (just one of scriptwriter Vladimir Sorokin's cinematic allusions to Chekhov) who arrive in an impoverished and isolated village - inhabited by old, toothless, impoverished, profane, and breast-tweaking hags - to bury their sister, are not played by professional actresses. They are three actual sisters who perform in a strip club.