This Soviet Georgian film, looking something like Franz Kafka meets Charlie Chaplin, is a riotous, scathingly anti-bureaucratic satire, a genuine piece of grotesquerie descended from Gogol and the Soviet Eccentric cinema. For invention, it matches any film of the French avant-garde, taking in all kinds of advanced filmic devices such as stop-motion, bits of puppetry and animation, as well as expressionist decor and exaggeratedly angular shooting. The energetic music track may have you dancing a kind of Soviet Charleston along with the film's most memorable character, a bureaucrat's wife who is caught up in a frenzy of bourgeois living.