AllMovie

Russian writer/director Boris Khlebnikov crafts his film Free Floating (aka Svobodnoye Plavanie) in the vein of such Northern European filmmakers as Bent Hamer and Aki Kaurismäki, known for their offhanded, slight, and quirky "minimalist" character comedies such as The Man Without a Past, Lights in the Dusk, and Kitchen Stories. Floating concerns Leonid (Alexander Yatsenko), a factory worker in a hamlet on the Volga River, who gets laid off when the Americans arrive and take over his company. He then drifts aimlessly from one job to another, from road repairman to market-based shoe salesman to plasterer. In time, Leonid meets a female schoolmate, and though their exchanges begin acerbically (laden with insult-swapping), the encounter eventually reveals a softer side.Khlebnikov's focus here is not on story, but on developing and heightening a sense of utter absurdity, drawing the film's flyspecks of humor from the utterly banal, such as a woman's method of peeling a boiled egg and the sound of a door creaking. Daria Ekamasova and Yevgeni Sytyi co-star.