General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Of Freaks and Men (Про уродов и людей)

Of Freaks and Men (Про уродов и людей, Pro urodov i lyudey) is a 1998 Russian drama film written and directed by Alexei Balabanov, set in turn-of-the-century St Petersburg, in which a pornographic photographer insinuates himself into two respectable families and destroys them.¹ It runs 93 minutes, was produced by the STV Film Company, and premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at the 51st Cannes Film Festival.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Alexei Balabanov, who also wrote the screenplay¹
Release	1998; world premiere 20 May 1998; shown in Directors' Fortnight at the 51st Cannes Film Festival³^•²
Setting	St Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century, before the revolution¹
Style	Sepia-toned monochrome with intertitles, alluding to photography around 1900 and silent film¹
Lead cast	Sergei Makovetsky (Johann), Viktor Sukhorukov (Viktor Ivanovich), Dinara Drukarova (Lisa), Anzhelika Nevolina (Ekaterina Kirillovna)³
Awards	Nika Awards 1999 for Best Film and Best Director; special prize at Kinotavr 1998; special prize at the Istanbul festival 1999⁴
Ratings	Kinopoisk 7.1 from 94,374 votes; IMDb 6.9³

Spoilers

Plot

The film follows two relatively affluent families in St Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century. The first is that of Doctor Stasov and his attractive but blind wife, Ekaterina Kirilovna; seventeen years earlier they adopted a pair of Siamese twins from Mongolia, Kolya and Tolya. The second family consists of the railway engineer Radlov and his daughter Lisa, an innocent and dreamy young woman in her twenties. Lisa hates the families' servant Grunya, who became her father's mistress after her mother died, and suspects Grunya of a secret liaison with Johann, the owner of a local photo studio.¹^•⁵

Johann, with his assistant Viktor Ivanovich, runs a respectable portraiture business as a front. In the studio's cellar he stages what the Russian synopsis calls a photographic theater of the Marquis de Sade, producing postcards of humiliated female nudity, including images of women being flogged with birch twigs, which he then distributes.³^•⁶ Gradually Johann worms his way into both households, and his influence coincides with the descent of one of the twins into alcoholism, the other's erotic obsession with Lisa, and Viktor's interest in Ekaterina.¹^•⁶ The film catches its fictional porn industry on the cusp of the movement from still photography to rudimentary moving pictures.⁶

Style

The film is shot in a heavy sepia tint with periodic silent-movie intertitles, in deliberate homage to photography around 1900 and to early cinema; the opening sequences are nearly soundless.¹^•⁶^•² The soundtrack uses classical Russian music by Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, and Sergei Prokofiev, among others.³ Filming took place in St Petersburg, Vyborg, and Yaroslavl.³

Critics placed the film in a lineage of grotesque cinema. Peter Bradshaw, reviewing it in The Guardian in 2000, compared Balabanov's St Petersburg to Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna, a world of furnished parlours and unacknowledged yearnings, and found the images reminiscent of Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin.⁶ Roger Clarke in The Independent noted the highly artificial sepia and the near-total absence of ordinary work outside the cellar where the autochromes are made.⁷

Origin and meaning

Balabanov said the impulse for the film came in Hamburg, where, while shooting his second feature The Castle, he saw old erotic postcards in an erotic museum and wanted to make a film about them.⁸ In a 1998 interview with Andrei Plakhov of Kommersant he insisted the film contained no symbols: "this is a love story, the most traditional love triangle, only placed in an unusual environment of pornographers, the blind, and Siamese twins."⁸ Asked directly who the freaks in the film were, he answered that the freaks are the Siamese twins and all the other characters are people.⁹

Scholarly readings have taken the film further. Frederick H. White, a scholar of Russian culture, argued in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema that the film is a postmodern commentary on post-Soviet society, using voyeurism, pornography, and perversion within a simulacrum of the Russian fin de siècle, with cultural quotations from Dostoevsky, degeneration theory, and the St Petersburg myth.¹⁰ The film scholar Tony Anemone reads the sepia-toned pre-revolutionary world as strikingly similar to the post-Soviet world of Balabanov's contemporary films, one where the weak and innocent are at the mercy of the strong and unscrupulous and pornographers ply their trade without apparent concern for the police.¹¹ A Cinephile journal essay likewise argues that, although set in 1890s Russia, the film expresses economic concerns rooted in its 1990s post-Soviet context, and that the borders between freakishness and normality grow increasingly tenuous as the narrative unfolds.¹²

Reception and awards

The film premiered at Cannes in May 1998 in the Directors' Fortnight.² At home its reception was hostile: Clarke reported in November 1998 that Russian audiences reviled the film at a domestic festival and that, partly due to economic collapse, it had no Russian distribution.⁷ Russian critics condemned it, as they later condemned Morphine, for decadence and for relishing sado-masochistic depravity in its stylized monochrome imagery.¹³

Awards followed in 1998 and 1999. The film received a special prize at the Kinotavr festival in Sochi, the main prize of the Festival of Festivals in St Petersburg, and a special prize at the Istanbul International Film Festival in 1999. At the Nika Awards, Russia's national film prizes, it won Best Film and Best Director for Balabanov, with nominations including Best Actor for Makovetsky and Best Cinematography for Sergei Astakhov; the European Film Academy nominated Drukarova for Best Actress.⁴ The film critic Aglaya Chechot, writing in the journal Seans, called it the first Balabanov film to become popular among the intelligentsia despite its strong flavor of marginality, and reported that Balabanov considered it his best work.¹⁴

Place in Balabanov's career

Of Freaks and Men followed the commercial success of Brother (1997) and marked a sharp stylistic turn.¹ Chechot identifies in it nearly the whole thematic repertoire of Balabanov's mature work: sadomasochism turned onto the idea of the homeland, the chronotope of withdrawal and mortal agony, sympathy for the freak and the outsider, and a criminal love of cinema, with the photographer Putilov here foreshadowing later camera-wielding characters.¹⁴ Some viewers and critics treat it as an unofficial prequel to Cargo 200 (2007), reading Balabanov's post-Victorian depravity as a companion to that film's Soviet-era depravity.³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026