TARGET (MISHEN) World Cinema

Set in 2020, TARGET envisions o culturally stagnant Russia where the disparity between classes is even greater than it is now, and where a whizzing superhighway connects the nation with its trade partners in China and France. Four ultra-wealthy Muscovites visit a strange rural spa to experience “The Target,” a former Soviet-era astrophysics facility that is bombarded with positive radiation from space, enabling it to function as a veritable fountain of youth. Upon returning to Moscow, newly energized yet emotionally dimmed, they find themselves locked in a cycle of infidelity and mistrust that obliquely mirrors the events of Tolstoy’s “Anno Karenina.” In TARGET, director Alexander Zeldovich , working from a script by playwright and novelist Vladimir Sorokin , has created a dystopian sci-fi landscape dipped in Easter egg hues, brimming with futuristic notions and classical philosophy. The result is an experience that is impossible to pigeon-hole – both thoroughly original and uniquely Russian.