A portly microbiologist, a starving child-laborer, and a mono-pedal Santa impersonator walk into a party. But this isn’t a bad joke. It’s the inciting incident for Celebration, a 2019 black comedy set and filmed—and then banned—in Russia.

On Monday, Columbia’s Russian Film Club traded last semester’s line-up of dismal, depressing drama for some hearty laughs with a film about wealth inequality, biological weapons, and Nazi espionage. And I have to say, it was hilarious.

Alexey Krasovsky’s Celebration is not your babushka’s black comedy. It is set during the blockade of Leningrad—a nearly three-year-long siege perpetrated on Soviet citizens during World War II that left more than a million civilians dead from starvation—but you wouldn’t know that from the film’s first scene. Throughout the cold open, it appears that the central conflict of the film will be how the film’s protagonist, Margarita, will manage to pluck a chicken to cook for her family’s New Year’s Eve feast. For three uncut minutes, she argues with Georgy, her clumsy, forgetful, biological-weapon-designer husband.

It is a charming domestic. Unfortunately, the family’s longtime personal chef left their employ yesterday. Fortunately, Georgy gifted his wife a brand-new cookbook. Unfortunately, she has never had to cook before. So it goes, on and on.

That is, until their love-struck (read: horny) son bursts through the front door with an emaciated and filthy young woman on his arm. The unlikely young couple met in a shelter during a Nazi air raid. They may have dodged the bombs, but their attraction was instantly incendiary. Or rather, Denis invited the starving Masha home for a meal. And then the sparks really flew.

As the children disappear—Denis to his embarrassingly juvenile boudoir, Masha to the bathroom to bathe and pilfer valuables—Margarita is faced with a problem much bigger than a feathered corpse. How is she going to hide her family’s abundance from Masha, whose own parents starved to death just last week? It isn’t her fault that her husband’s important work for the Soviet military affords the family special privileges not available to her less worthy comrades. Still, Masha might have a heart attack if she sees all of the bread, meat, lard, and alcohol in the dining room without explanation. While that would solve the immediate problem on her hands, it would also break Denis’s pubescent heart. She couldn’t possibly upset her son.

Thus begins a series of foibles only exacerbated when Margarita’s elder daughter, Liza, arrives at the party with her new fiancé. Once a soldier, he avoids combat due to a mysterious injury that left him several toes short of a full set. Now he makes sculptures out of garbage.

With the clock creeping ever closer to the new year and Margarita’s dreams of quiet opulence steadily unraveling before her helpless eyes, it becomes clear that—for all the uncontrollable laughter emanating from the screening’s small audience—Celebration is more than a mindless comedy. As Russian Film Club co-founder and Harriman Institute teaching fellow Dr. Daria Ezerova explained at the outset of Monday night’s showcase, the film has a contentious history, including being banned from theatrical release in Russia. 

For a film to be shown in Russian theaters, it must first be granted a distribution license from the Culture Ministry. According to Dr. Eserova, this is usually not a barrier to entry for most films made today. However, the 2018 ban of The Death of Stalin—another black comedy centered around the struggle for power within the USSR’s Council of Ministers following the death of the titular General Secretary—has raised the question of whether the Culture Ministry is beginning to engage in soft censorship. 

Ostensibly, The Death of Stalin was banned for the desecration of Russia’s historical symbols. Additionally, the film would have been released just before the 75th anniversary of The Battle of Stalingrad. This, the Culture Ministry argued, would be offensive to the veterans who risked life and limb valiantly defending their homeland during World War II—or “The Great Patriotic War,” as it is known in Russia. Celebration was barred from government funding and theatrical release for largely these same reasons. 

Undeterred by these setbacks, screenwriter and director Alexey Krasovsky pressed on with the creation of his film, which was funded entirely independently, mainly through private donations. Thus, Celebration became a perfect illustration of how limitation often fuels art. The film is set entirely in one location, the family’s home, and only features seven credited actors, one of whom has no lines and never appears on camera. The perspective is often fixed, with limited cuts and extensive use of long takes. But these are all virtues, not vices. The singular setting solidifies the film’s familial concerns, as does the small ensemble. Even the lingering camera augments the blunt dialogue and deadpan delivery that characterizes the film’s unique comedic sensibility. 

The quality of the film did not go unnoticed. After its release on the director’s private YouTube channel, Celebration received critical praise for both its enjoyability and its careful social critique that manages to respect the resilience of those who overcame terrible hardship while still exposing the injustices that exacerbated their struggle from within.

Still, Russian elites condemned the film after its release. Could it be that this story of inequality and its ugly consequences might still be true—and therefore threatening—today?

After the film concludes, Krasovsky addresses the audience directly. He asks for support—financial and intellectual—in order to keep making films that push the boundaries of what one is allowed to make and to mock. And it seems that if we don’t give it to him, nobody will.

The Russian Film Club will screen three more films, all comedies, throughout this semester. On Monday, March 7th, they will showcase Deeper!. This zany flick is a far cry from the dark tone of Celebration, bringing together the penetrating world of adult films and the stuffy world of highbrow theatre. Registration is free for CUID holders. 

Celebration Film Cover via Russian Film Club.