VIDEO: The trailer for Absurdistan
Delicatessen sort of meets Borat in Veit Helmer's visually ripe, magic-realism-lite tale of life in a mythical Eastern European country that time forgot after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc.
Temelko (Maximilian Mauff) and Aya (Kristýna Malérová) are childhood sweethearts, but their lovy-dovy relationship is disrupted when the ladies of Absurdistan, who include the now-teenage Aya, go on a sex strike. They're peeved because the men have been too lazy to repair a municipal water pipe, and that's left the mini-country as parched as a desert.
Helmer's film is nice to look at, with an unusual palette of lush, saturated colors, but the story, amid a barrage of sight gags, is more thin than absurd.