The Man Who Surprised Everyone is much more than a movie about a man who is wearing a dress. It is a quiet meditation on the shortness of life and the fight to make it longer. It is almost a fairytale that, it seems, some people took too literally.
Yegor is a forest guard in Siberia. He is happily married and his wife is expecting their second child. Once Yegor finds out that he has about two months to live, he first tries to hide the fact from his wife, Natalia. When Natalia learns about her husband's condition, she goes all the way to find a way to treat him. They even visit a Shaman. When nothing seems to help, the Shaman Woman tells an old legend about drake Zhamba who disguised himself to cheat death. Yegor starts to dress up as a woman. First, his wife finds out and soon the whole village knows. And the villagers don't take kindly that highly respected Yegor is now dressing as a woman.
The film was neatly paced and perfectly balanced. The tragedy never becomes overwhelming and it is smoothed out with little bits of humor in here and there (come on, the moment where all the villagers had gathered at Yegor's door and demanded him to come out, and then finally the man appears in the red dress, nylons, and high heeled boots, and confidently struts through the crowd). Especially the first hour of the movie was nearly perfect. There were a lot of quiet moments but they didn't feel empty. These moments carried the movie as well as all other parts. The acting was perfect - Evgeniy Tsyganov as Yegor, a quiet man who has accepted his faith but still decides to go further with his fight for survival. Natalya Kudryashova deserves every praise she has gotten for her role. The handheld cinematography was smooth and added much to the overall atmosphere of the movie without turning it into unnecessarily artsy. The different themes were seamlessly intertwined. Not to mention the beautiful Siberian nature that gave the movie a mystical and fairytale-like atmosphere.
Unfortunately, the final act was a total letdown, and many questions were left unanswered. The film was ambiguous enough, it didn't need an ambiguous ending. A more concrete conclusion would have benefited the movie more. We saw that Natalia visited Yegor at his hideout. She washed the man and did his make-up. The next scene is in the waiting room of the hospital where Yegor is waiting while Natalia gives birth. Then Yegor gets the MRI and doctors find no trace of cancer. And then Yegor is alone in the hospital room. THE END. Did Yegor's wife accept the man's strange behavior? Did she forgive him? He was cured of cancer, but why was he in the hospital? Was it a psychiatric ward? Did he go back to the village? How the villagers took his recovery? It also became annoying that Yegor didn't even bother to explain his behavior. I get it, he was the quiet stoic guy, and after the first confrontation with his wife, he was embarrassed. Also, it seemed that it was the community that sticks out for each other, so there could have been a pretty good possibility to explain the situation. Instead, Yegor's actions started to make less and less sense.
Peculiar movie with an interesting story. Although its main message seemed to be about being different in a fairly conservative community, the film went further than just the gender issue.
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