Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Andrei Khrzhanovsky's "Poltory komnaty" ("Room and a Half" in English) takes a fictionalized look at Joseph Brodsky. My interpretation of much of the movie is that Brodsky viewed the cat as a better friend than most people, but he did eventually make an effort to make peace with people. As he says at the end of the movie, we are all condemned to death.Much of the movie is told as animated sequences, creating an ethereal feeling. No doubt this is to emphasize Brodsky's disillusionment with life in the Soviet Union. One of the most effective scenes is a "meeting" that he has with his parents (in reality, all of them are dead by this point) towards the end of the movie. Whether in life or death, he didn't see much future for Russia.I've read a few of Brodsky's works. They certainly evoke a Russian existence. As for the movie, it's not a masterpiece, but I recommend it.

Generally,for the most part,fiction films dealing with real life persons have always left me cold,so I approached this film with a sense of dread. Guess what? It turned out better than I expected (although not without a flaw,or two,but more about that later).'Poltory Komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na rodinu',released in English speaking countries as 'A Room And A Half',focuses on Joseph Brodsky,a Russian poet,who was exiled by the Soviet government in the early 1960's for ideas that were anti Soviet (as well as the horrific crime of being Jewish,by Soviet standards),is the central focus in this film. We see an aged Brodsky (played by Grigory Dityatkowsky),usually sitting around,either on a boat,or in some New York Russian social club, ruminating over what has happened to the Russia of his dreams. Incorporating narrative,Brodsky's poetry,animation,visual expressionism (Brodsky's parents are at times represented as a pair of black birds,as a visual metaphor),we get a feel of what it's like to be the odd man out, in an era of totalitarianism,as well as vile anti Semitism. The rest of the cast is rounded out by Alisa Friendich,as Brodsky's Mother,Sergei Yursky as Brodsky's Father (no first names are ever given),as well as Svetlana Kryqichkova,Alexander Bergman,Vladimir Rozygraed,and way too many to mention here. The film does at times acts as a mirror for certain aspects of Russian social history in the early to mid 20th century If I have any quirk about this film,is that it is a bit long in the tooth (clocking in at 130 minutes is a bit much---20 minutes could easily have been pruned out without compromising the film's message). Veteran film maker/animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky ('Osen') directs from a screen play written by Yuri Arabov & Khrzhanovsky. The film's poetic cinematography is by Vladimir Brylyakov,with editing by Ryjonkov Evgeni,Timofey Golobororodko & Lacis Normund. A film for the deep thinker in all of us. Spoken in Russian with English subtitles. Not rated by the MPAA,this film serves up one brief outburst of strong language,some brief nudity,some minor sexual content & some on screen smoking & drinking of alcohol

English readers of Joseph Brodsky's Book of essays that won him the Nobel Prize(Less than One) will recognize the film's title as coming from an essay in the book: "A Room and a Half." It is both a real and a symbolic space to which the poet never returned. The Filmmaker's fantasy-plot, however, takes off by withholding one of the most famous of Brodsky's poetic line "To St. Basil's (Vasilievsky) Island I will come to die." For those familiar with these lines, their absence becomes a form of suspense - until the are spoken in the last scenes. The historical canvas of Brodsky's like unfolds against a stylistic montage from Shadow-silhouette cut-out of the prerevolutionary poetic-aristocratic world of Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, etc. to the use of this avant-garde art form in service of the October Revolution. The Stalin-era film is the orange-tinged film stock of that era; the animation of the crows in the snow seems lifted from master animators of the 1970s. As a biography the film make me think most of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror," which brings together the scraps of images, paintings, poetry in an attempt to find a new wholeness with stream-of-consciousness connections, seamlessly connecting documentary images of the real Brodsky and his friends (as in th scene shot in the Restaurant Russian Samovar" on 53rd St.), with imaginary meeting of parents and child in the afterlife.

Out of the movie, the first thing I can think of is its sensual cinematography immersed in saturated colors. The film is more than a biopic, it involves the imagination of the writer and director to make it a poetic look into a Nobel laureate poet's life, that of Joseph Brodsky's.The movie starts in his childhood and ends after his death, and in fact the part after his death, like most of the other parts of the movie is beautiful fiction. There is an overdose of anti-Soviet tones but that must also reflect what he had to go through until his defection to the US and his parents' troubles with Soviet officials while trying in vain to visit him. No question all of that was true but somehow the movie put too much emphasis on it.The movie also explored family dynamics from childhood, in a touchy and insightful way how his family bonds were strong, though this also must be fiction. So it is actually better to watch this movie as a pure fiction movie and a good one. And to watch a biography mixed with fiction is surely refreshing.I have seen this movie in Istanbul Film Festival and found it as one of the better ones in competition.