Before watching this film, the best of Ovcharov's film for me was "Barabaniada". After this vivid funny film with less manipulated shots than later his works,"Nebyvalshchina" is my favorite,even though I could seen it only once. It's meaningless to explain how far Ovcharov's imagination had gone in this first feature-length film made before Perestroika,in the last days of "Stagnation".This film must be seen without any conventional criteria for art-house cinema, with willingness to laugh, as we were used to do so in our childhood when reading a funny folk story. Ovcharov here doesn't criticize Soviet regime, neither any concrete state or time, but Russian folklore is transformed into an universal technique for laughing at stupid human nature to wish the limitless wealth and endless happiness. So it's natural that this film's style echoes Alexsander Medvedkin's silent film "Happiness", which also uses folklore as a model for cinema to represent universal, simple, timeless truth.
