Sorgoï Prakov (2013)

Premise: Meet Sorgoï! He’s this silly, kinda goofy guy from a country that sounds made up right in the middle of Belarus and Russia, and he wants to start a career as a journalist. His goal? To travel all around europe in a heart shaped path, starting with Paris, both to introduce people to his country, to let people from there learn about europe and to wonder about the question “is there such thing as an European Dream?”.
Things get slightly out of hand.

Under 90 minutes? A tiny bit over that.
Do they say the title? Sorgoï very helpfully introduces himself during the first five minutes. The alternate title is Descent into Darkness and they don’t say that one, but, you know. You win some, you lose some.

First thing I thought of:

Okay, more: Well, that was surprisingly unnerving! Sorgoï’s life gets, uh, let’s say kinda complicated very early. At first it feels like the world’s conspiring against our poor friend because he gets the full Parisian experience (someone tries to steal his camera, he eats a croissant, he gets beaten up, he gets drunk as hell, etc), then as the film inches forward you start to realize that maybe that weird and goofy smile is actually a really creepy smile, and then things really get out of hand, and just in case you weren’t really paying attention it gets more and more obvious that our friend acquaintance Sorgoï has some deep issues. And, uhm, then it gets kinda worse, and then he stops being verbal, and the editing keeps getting worse, and. And surprisingly, most of the violence happens off screen, thank goodness for that in this case! I don’t know, I kinda loved how this movie plays with the whole unreliable narrator gimmick, and not in the obvious “he’s not saying the truth at all times” way, but “he’s actually the one editing the movie, so, you only see what he wants you to see”.
All in all, a very optimistic way to plan your next vacation.

A simple way to improve it: There’s a grindcore track right by the end of the credits and it would have been fun to know what Sorgoï thought about the genre.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia and letterboxd user reviews:

About 90% of the reviews make a joke about this being Borat, Borat’s director’s cut and so on and it’s like “my friend, repeating the joke but louder doesn’t make it any funnier.

Unlike anytime your favourite blog references how the next song is about shooting blood out of your c-