The director of the famous Mermaid had already shown her fondness for tragicomic melodrama in her debut film Mars. Shrewdly combining the fantastic with the ordinary, she comments on the eccentricities of heart and mind in her compatriots, taken unawares by their new post-Soviet circumstances. The instigator behind the film’s bizarre goings-on is a boxer who finds himself in the town of Marx (in Russian spelled "Marks”). The provincial town resembles the mysterious planet in various ways, not only because of the "K” missing from the neon station sign. Everything happens here in a somewhat deranged manner. The local currency takes the form of toys manufactured at the town plant. The local women are still hoping for happiness, but their ideas and attempts to achieve it seem martian. Their bitterly terrestrial existence is eloquently conveyed in precise details, characteristic of the mentality of provincial Russians. At the same time, the film’s keen observations don’t contradict, but rather enhance, the sense of an encounter with the phantasmagoric. The role of the narrator is entrusted to the camera which, with vitality and unobtrusive detachment, instils in everything that happens an aroma of ambivalence...