IMDB - 7.5/10 (35 votes)
[quote]
The Asthenic Syndrome
Directed by
Kira Muratova
Written by
Sergei Popov, Alexander Chernych, and Muratova
With
Popov, Olga Antonova, Natalya Busko, Galina Sachurdaewa, Alexandra Ovenskaya, and Natalya Rallewa.
Rating
* * * *
Masterpiece
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Every time I am asked what the film is about, I reply, quite honestly, "It's about everything." --Kira Muratova, 1990Directed by
Kira Muratova
Written by
Sergei Popov, Alexander Chernych, and Muratova
With
Popov, Olga Antonova, Natalya Busko, Galina Sachurdaewa, Alexandra Ovenskaya, and Natalya Rallewa.
Rating
* * * *
Masterpiece
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Seven years have passed since I first saw Kira Muratova's awesome The Asthenic Syndrome at the Toronto film festival, and while waiting for it to find its way to Chicago I've had plenty of time to speculate about why a movie of such importance should be so hard for us to see. Insofar as movies function as newspapers, this one has more to say about the state of the world in the past decade than any other new film I've seen during the same period, though what it has to say isn't pretty. So maybe the reason it's entitled to only one local screening--at the Film Center this Sunday--is the movie business's perception that it must offer only pretty pictures. Or maybe it's the radical, sprawling form of The Asthenic Syndrome--a movie that breaks all the usual rules when it comes to telling a story and clearly distinguishing between fiction and documentary, fantasy and reality, "prose" and "poetry," anger and detachment.
Or maybe the fact that it was directed by a Russian woman in her mid-50s--even the most celebrated living Russian woman filmmaker, which counts for little in our culture, with its relative indifference to Russian filmmaking--automatically gives it the status of an esoteric specialty item. (It's playing as part of an excellent program, "Sisters: Films by Russian Women," packaged by Wendy Lidell--one of this country's key programmers, who introduced American viewers to filmmakers such as Raul Ruiz and Hou Hsiao-hsien before the collapse of government funding for the arts ended her Cutting Edge series.) After all, we're told implicitly as well as explicitly by our cultural commissars that human experience is no longer universal: women are different from men, Russians are different from Americans, the elderly and middle-aged are different from the young, the rich are different from the poor, the educated are different from the uneducated, smokers are different from nonsmokers, Republicans are different from Democrats. Such, at any rate, is the way most products--including movies and politicians--are sold, and the way products are sold forms many of our philosophical presuppositions about what we like and who we are.
From this point of view, we might agree with Russian critic Andrei Dementyev, who declared The Asthenic Syndrome "the only masterpiece of glasnost cinema." It's certainly explicit about many of the horrors Russians lived through in that period--and are still living through--without being especially political or ideological in its attack, only ethical and humanist. Yet even though I've never been to Russia, my instincts tell me that throughout the cold war, for all the differences in the ways they lived, Russians and Americans were linked by their common subservience to the same "system"--a system that was neither communism nor capitalism but the cold war itself. And now that the cold war is over, we still seem to be sharing portions of the same destiny and life experiences, thanks to the confusions of the postcommunist aftershock and the whims of the global economy.
The central poetic vision of The Asthenic Syndrome--as relevant to America in 1996 as it was to Russia in 1989--is that two basic, debilitating forms of compulsive behavior are loose in the world today, extreme aggressiveness and extreme passivity: either people walk down the street picking fights at random with other people, or they go to sleep at a moment's notice, regardless of what's happening around them. "Asthenia" is defined in the American College Dictionary as "lack or loss of strength: debility," and some critics have given Muratova's film an alternate English title, The Weakness Syndrome. Apparently Muratova connects the syndrome to both kinds of behavior. Both, after all, are ways of being "out of control." It might be said that formally speaking The Asthenic Syndrome is "out of control" as well. It's a film that alternately assaults you and nods off--usually without warning and often when you're least expecting it. Mean-spirited and assertive one moment, narcoleptic and in complete denial the next, it bears an astonishing resemblance to the disconcerting rhythm of contemporary public life.
[...]
[ http://www.chireader.com/movies/archive ... 09136.html ][/quote]
One of Kira Muratova's masterpieces.
THE LINK:
Kira Muratova - Sindrome astenica - Astenicheskiy sindrom - 1989 (RUS sub ITA).avi 
A pal named Sobsob made the subs from the English transcript I made!
The movie is amazing, btw
(the sound is very low on the last third, sadly).REAL SUBS:
Kira Muratova - Sindrome astenica - Astenicheskiy sindrom - 1989 (RUS sub ITA) ENG.srt DIRECT LINK:
**COMING**
and no subs... 
... I think I wouldnt understand what they says... 
I'm gonna clik on it 
