AllMovie

The producers of this black and white art film showed it around at every film festival they could get it entered into, from Melbourne to Cannes. An enigmatic and very poetic drama with an inconclusive storyline, it may not be everyone's cup of tea. The story concerns a somewhat disoriented young man, Jack (Noah Taylor), who turns up on the streets of West Berlin speaking only Russian. Not only that, but everything he says is a quotation from classic Russian novels by Gogol and Dostoyevsky. He is treated like the curious character he appears to be. It is not until he runs into a girl who reminds him of a favorite character in one of the novels that he begins speaking a language anyone can understand, and it begins to seem as though he might be a slightly deranged Australian. He wanders the streets of Berlin with the girl and her female friend, talking about anything and everything in English, falls in love with one of them, and fantasizes about the the girl and himself in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg.