Otar Ioseliani, the dean of Soviet Georgian cinema, director of the award winning films When the Leaves Fall (1966), The Singing Blackbird (1970) and Pastorale (1976), took up residence in Paris in 1981. Ioseliani calls Favorites of the Moon (a French-Italian co-production) "an abstract comedy," and as critic J. Hoberman writes, "it has a civilized, amoral quality.... Fast and fragmentary, it opens in the 18th century, darts ahead a hundred years...and lands in the present.... (The) film's action is confined to two or three days and concerns a particular galaxy of Parisians (whose) paths cross and criss-cross and loop-the-loop as they become involved in multiple, often secret, relationships.... As Ioseliani spins his web of convoluted, comic connections, key objects-namely a 19th century nude portrait and an 18th century porcelain dinner service-change hands among the protagonists, dwindling and disintegrating ever more drastically before our eyes. Bought and stolen, lost and found, ripped and smashed, these bourgeois treasures...are the movie's secret stars. Favorites of the Moon is a film about the interpenetration of past and present, about the life and death of things. And although everyone in the enormous cast has his or her reasons, what they are is largely a mystery-the people here are just more complicated objects."