Perestroika

A fascinatingly strange (and strained) midlife-crisis movie, Slava Tsukerman’s quasihistorical drama unspools in the year 1992, when astrophysicist Sasha (Robards) returns to Moscow from his 17-year exile to encounter thawing political conditions and unresolved affairs. Toggling between Soviet-era flashbacks and contemporary cocktail parties, Perestroika is refreshingly heady, taking cues from scientific ideas (voiced, authoritatively, by F. Murray Abraham’s mentor figure) as well as the titular “restructuring” afoot. Writer-director Tsukerman (Liquid Sky) creates an artificial flow of video backdrops and sound dubbing, resulting in something decidedly awkward, yet fetchingly personal.