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To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

i love this film for all it's beauty, madness, romance, harsh gritty-reality, poetry, music, courage, and heart. i'm saddened to hear this film is no longer being distributed because it is a masterpiece which most anyone can enjoy and be enriched from...regardless of age or nationality. the story translates on numerous levels and the characters are acted with supreme respect for their condition....be that condition primarily political or one having to do mental-illness.the actors sparkle in their depiction of the asylum-population.... we come to understand many of them for their individuality. what we see is how quirks can be gifts and fantasies are what keeps us going sometimes. love is symbolized as a train and war arrives when the train doesn't. war is between enemies but enemies are not always what they seem.this movie danced across my eyes and now it dances in my consciousness. i'm in search of copies of this to share with my friends and family!!!

Andrei Konchalovsky wrote and directed the Russian film, House of Fools.The movie tells the story of a psychiatric hospital on the border of Russia and Chechnya, during the war. Zhanna, who is in love with pop star Bryan Adams, is a patient at the hospital. While the war rages on, the medical staff leaves, presumably to find a safer place for the patients. While the staff is absent, the patients have to deal with each other, soldiers, and reality of war.Konchalovsky's purpose is to show that even in war, one can still dream and feel at home. Zhanna, who is duped into thinking that she will marry one of the Chechan soldiers, must deal with rejection, in addition to the war itself. The one thing that gets her through it is musician Bryan Adams. She imagines that Bryan is right there with her. She dreams that one day the two of them will get married. She uses these dreams to help herself get through her problems.Zhanna and the other patients are surprised when Chechan soldiers use the facility as their headquarters. Eventually, after falling in love with one of the soldiers, Zhanna is confronted with major battle occurring right outside her window. Eventually, the Russians win the fight.The theme of violence as an unnatural occurrence is seen throughout the film. Whenever violence is portrayed, it is shown as wrong. We see this through the eyes of Zhanna, who sees a soldier shot and killed right in front of her eyes.I enjoyed this movie. As many people have said, it is a war film without actually being about war. My favorite part of the film was the portrayal of Zhanna by Yuliya Vysotskaya. She gives the character life, by portraying her as a misunderstood do-gooder who takes imaginary journeys with Bryan Adams.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a great movie that was based on an even greater book, but I wish people wouldn't compare this movie to that one so often. Yes, the similarities are extensive and impossible to miss, but House of Fools, as the title translates into English, is a different film that has it's own weight and it's own meanings. This is not, by any means whatsoever, another vision of Ken Kesey's classic, nor is it a remake in any way of that of Milos Forman. (spoilers) Yuliya Vysotskaya, who played Janna, the main character, delivers a wonderful performance of this woman who lives in a mental hospital right on the Russian border during the Chechen War (a war about which I admittedly know absolutely nothing). Her ailment is never made clear (nor are any of the others), except for a scene in the middle of the movie where she reveals, through dialogue, some of what are probably many more illusions (I won't count her illusory belief that she can dance). As she is being abandoned by Ahmed, who she thinks is the love of her life, she tells him that she loves him, and asks him to please don't kill her. Then she tells the mud that she loves it, and please don't kill her, etc.Her mental condition is not important, although her character, while skillfully performed, is so laden with a cloying freight of symbolism that it often becomes difficult to see her as a person rather than a heavily symbolic character in a heavily symbolic movie. There is a common misconception (supported by the movie's very own tagline) that the doctors at the mental hospital around which the story revolved abandoned the patients, leaving them to fend for themselves during the Chechen War during which the movie takes place. I don't really understand this assertion, since the doctor returns at the end of the film, explains what happened to him when he went to find a bus to transfer the patients to a better hospital. Just the fact that he returned should have been enough to show that he didn't simply ditch them all.I wish I had a better memory for the names of the characters in the movie, because one of the other patients, the one with the wraparound glasses and the backpack full of his poetry, played a significant role in the movie. He and Janna are clearly the mother and father figures for the rest of the patients when they are left to their own devices, seeing over the rest of the cast and, periodically, offering the chance for audience members to question the validity of their respective mental instabilities. I don't know much about mental disorders, but there were certainly scenes in this movie where it seemed to me that they were being treated for more mental instability than they regularly displayed. These were balanced out, however, by scenes where they each displayed rather crippling disabilities, his the complete inability to communicate or assess situations effectively, and hers some dangerous attachment issues and the displacement of emotions onto things like inanimate objects. As far as the war goes, I won't go into detail about the meaning of the war itself in the film because, like I mentioned above, I know nothing about the war that is going on offscreen, but the movie makes some interesting points about the chaos and destructiveness of war. One of them is the almost-cliché of the man who saves another man's life, only to find himself fighting on the opposite side from him later on. Sort of a cliché by now, yes, but it adds to the movie's later concentration on the chaos and confusion surrounding war in general. There are several scenes in which the mental patients are understandably terrified and utterly lost as to what is going on around them. This is to be expected, but there are also several scenes in which the soldiers and even their commanders are pretty confused as to what is happening. One tense scene has two opposing factions facing each other (notably making an illicit drug deal), when one of the soldiers carelessly stumbles on his gun, making it fire off a few rounds into the air, which leads to the two groups firing machine guns at each other for several seconds before anyone realizes that it was all just a stupid mistake. The soldier who accidentally caused it laughs it off.The references to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are everywhere. The patients are left to their own devices (in this case because the doctor left longer than intended because he was delayed by the war, in the other case because McMurphy persuaded them all to escape for a while), which has a healing effect on all of them but not enough to make any of them want to leave the hospital, their home, at the end of the film. There's an interesting element of the movie involving Bryan Adams, who literally colors Janna's life with his music, even though she has a completely delusional relationship with him, which would seem to have a detrimental effect on her mental health. What I see by his occasional entrances into the movie are not some weak effort to provide recognizance by inserting an American pop star, but a layered effect of meaning that reflects the many other layers of meaning in the film. Bryan Adams, while he is not meant to have had a real relationship with this woman who thinks that she is engaged to him, lights up her life with his music (notice how the color fills the screen when it's playing), while she attempts to do the same for the rest of the patients with her own accordion playing. She doesn't always succeed with all of them, but she certainly does much more than she does with the soldiers, who she also plays for on more than one occasion, and is laughed at each time (which may very well signify some kind of juvenile cynicism among the lower ranks of military forces). I don't pretend to understand every level of symbolism that is portrayed in this movie, but it's important to notice that they're there. It's amazing how much more meaning and importance some little movie from Russia like this has than the typical multi-million dollar blockbuster released here in America, and I really wish that people would pay at least a tiny bit more attention to the few movies released (dare I say the majority of which come from other countries?) that actually mean something. There are a lot of things in this movie that are difficult to comprehend, indeed, many which seem to be in the movie as examples of pure artistic expression, but the movie as a whole, like it's main character, is so laden with meaning and symbolism that it is virtually impossible to see it all on just one viewing. The movie deserves at LEAST that much.

The main benefit of this film is it draws attention to a conflict most of the world has ignored. I wish I could have ignored the copious use of Bryan Adams in a `cameo' appearance that repeats liked a scratched record. Surprising from a seemingly experienced director. My favorite part was the impromptu marriage of the films star to a Chechen fighter. It made the film more interesting. This film gives a favorable view of the Chechen rebels, which is surprising given the enormous amount of bad press they receive. Certainly both the Russians and the Chechen fighters have fought a rather dirty war with accounts of war crimes on both sides. One scene shows a Russian and Chechen commander talking to each other during a truce and suddenly realizing they both fought in the same Soviet paratrooper unit in Afghanistan. Most of the Chechen rebels served in the army of the Soviet Union. Nice touch. I enjoyed the film but I think it definitely has a limited audience.