Paul Mazursky's movie about a Russian circus musician who defects in Bloomingdale's is his most thematically, even ideologically, tangy to date. In the long run, it is perhaps too intractably thematic in conception. But not in the short run, nor even in the middle-distance run. It goes along quite well and quite far as a series of experiments in cultural chemistry: the Russian and his Italian girlfriend, the Russian and his Cuban lawyer, the Russian and his FBI "shadows," the Russian and the Columbia University Poli.-Sci. professor, the Russian and the Texas businessman, the Russian and the homosexual cruiser. Ultimately, however, the shortcoming of the movie -- and there always seems to be one of those in a Mazursky movie -- is that the personal story never remotely comes up to the thematic level: the events, that is, never take on as large a personal meaning as a cultural one, and the movie loses its drive and its inventiveness and its novelty when it begins to work out narrative resolutions. With Robin Williams. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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