First, we need to talk about the book and its author. Boris Vian was a drug addict, and this is not an insult, but a biographical fact. Durily, he brought his body to such a state that in recent years he suffered from breakdowns, treated the lungs and died at only 39 years of heart rupture. His book “Foam of Days”, which for some reason is praised by some perverted aesthetes, is built as follows: take a completely banal love story with a bad ending and add Tons of hallucinatory images to it, with which the author is familiar not from hearsay, so clichéd mediocrity turns into kitsch, and already he can be mistaken for avant-gardism by those who need it. The psycho will always find his Partre.
And now the authors of the film had a rather difficult task - to film the selected hallucinatory delusions of a drug addict. This was the main point of their work, because the plot, special effects, scenery, actions of the characters reflect only this - the vision of the world through the eyes of a completely finished junkie who has lost touch with reality. I must admit that the authors succeeded. I see the resulting film as the success of filmmakers who challenged the senseless and managed to cope with such a strange task. I have always believed that books should be filmed as close to the text as possible or not filmed at all.
For comparison, “Futurological Congress” was filmed so that there were no original characters or events, from the book survived exactly 3 short scenes.
And here almost everything was taken literally, so well done.
However, I wrote about the film in terms of its creation. What about just watching it? You can't watch it. Bullshit. On the screen is given 3-4 narcotic images per minute, than the film far surpasses the recognized drug masterpiece “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, betting on the same. If you clean out all the nonsense from the plot, then the story remains: met-married-ill-died. And as a side-quest story about a friend who spent all his money on drugs and was killed by the police (Shik's addiction to a favorite author is a conscious or not metaphor for drug addiction). At some points, I wanted to ask “Why did the hero’s house start to dry up,” “Why did the guns he hatched grow crooked,” “Why did the cops take them into service,” but the next moment I reminded myself exactly what I was looking at, and the questions dropped.
Translation. It was mistranslated. In the main translation of the book there are at least successful language jokes, for example, the currency there is called "Inflanks", here instead of them is a completely faceless word "dubrison", which does not respond to the Russian viewer at all. And there are moments like that. However, I can’t really blame the translators for not reading this labuda.