Dead Man's Bluff (2005)

Dead Man's Bluff, or Zhmurki (Russian: Жмурки) is a 2005 Russian black comedy/crime film.

Director Aleksei Balabanov, who directed Brother and Brother 2, uses "uniformly ace" (Variety) cameo performances, by Russia's most prominent actors. The film suggests that in the mean free-market streets of Russia in the beginning of 90-s, the only real liberty was the freedom to kill.

Approximately 50 liters of fake blood were used in the film. With the exception of a few scenes in Moscow, the film was shot in Tver, the city formerly known as Kalinin, and Nizhny Novgorod, the city known as Gorky in Soviet times.

The stars of the film include famous Russian actors such as Nikita Mikhalkov (best known to American audiences for his work in Burnt by the Sun), Aleksei Serebryakov, Dmitri Dyuzhev, Aleksei Panin, Sergei Makovetsky, Igor Sukachev, Viktor Sukhorukov, and Renata Litvinova. Actually, there are more than 20 Russian-movie stars in the film, but it's not easy to recognize them immediately since they are all in disguise.

The film features an eclectic collection of Russia's biggest movie stars while the choice for music was simply a mix of Russia's local punk act.

This film is a first attempt at a comedic movie by Balabanov. The movie serves as a dark humor farce on typical gangster movies that were prevalent within Russian society around 1990. The movie received mixed reviews, with some critics writing disparaging reviews stating that the plot left much to be desired and most of the jokes fell flat, while others argued that the movie was a successful attempt by Balabanov to add a new movie genre to his repertoire.

Synopsis

The film opens with a professor lecturing a group of university students. The professor says: "Start-up capital is how everything begins - it makes it possible to start a business and multiply the initial investment many times over. The key question is how to get start-up capital..." By way of example, she begins to tell a story that supposedly took place a decade earlier during the socioeconomic tumult in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Actors