Peculiarities of the National Hunt (1995) on Netflix
Raivo, a Finnish student, comes to Russia to study its hunting traditions and joins General Ivolgin's hunting party. Also along are the woodsman Kuz'mich and CID officer Lyova Soloveychik.
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- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.4/105,306 votes
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Plot summary
Raivo, a Finnish student, travels to Russia to collect material on Russian hunting traditions and is taken up by a group preparing a hunt in a rural forest. The party includes General Ivolgin, whom the others call Mikhalych, the woodsman Kuz'mich, the CID officer Lyova Soloveychik, and city men from St. Petersburg. Kuz'mich is also a devotee of Zen Buddhism. Raivo pictures a hunt like those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with many people, horses, dogs and French conversation. What the group actually does is drink, sit in the banya and call on the local milkmaids, and the hunt itself is something they will get around to.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Peculiarities of the National Hunt (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The cast of Peculiarities of the National Hunt initially believed they were making an art film rather than a comedy, a view director Aleksandr Rogozhkin shared. As the creators later admitted, the script gradually turned into a comedy by itself during filming.
- Director Aleksandr Rogozhkin forbade his actors from reading newspapers or watching television during the shoot, so that they would "renounce civilization".
- Alcohol was drunk only in minimal quantities, mostly to keep warm, because many scenes, including the banya, were shot in freezing cold. Actor Sergey Russkin said a drinking actor thinks he is playing well, but the camera "is a deeply sober being".
- The only scene shot with non-sober actors was the UAZ ride, and the shoot was forced because the car was lent to the film crew for one evening only.
- Aleksandr Rogozhkin's film was one of the first and most successful examples of "cinema for the people" (narodnoe kino), which followed debates over the sad state of the Russian film industry in the mid-1990s.
- The film's title gave Russia a stock phrase: "Peculiarities of national ..." is often used in the Russian press and in literature.
- Made in the mid-1990s, when the number of Russian films produced had dropped sharply, the film was a box-office success and caused a whole wave of imitations and borrowings in Russian cinema.
