We watched Demobbed, a black Russian comedy from about 2000. In one sense it's typically Russian humour, the absurdism of the situation filtered through a fatalistic cynicism and tempered with alcoholism. It reminded me somewhat of The Suitcase by Dovlatov and my girlfriend said something about Chekhov. But on the other hand, seeing as the film is all about the army, it could also be viewed in the tradition of those books/films about the insanity of the army - not war, I specifically mean the army. I'm thinking of Sword of Honour, Mash, Catch 22, certain sections of A Dance to the Music of Time etc etc Basically this film is pretty much Catch 22 but in Russia in the early 21st Century.
The main characters are a bunch of feckless recruits who have failed at everything, including their attempt to evade being recruited into the army. Now trapped they spend their time drinking, trying to avoid being bullied by older recruits and hoping that they don't get given some totally insane orders by their crazy superiors.
What lifts this film out of the ordinary is the focus and tautness. From the start the jokes (for want of a better word) come at you thick and fast, the film maintains quality and impact of the lines from the beginning to the very end unlike other films that go for this style of rapid fire humour, there is simply no let up. Watching it with two others we stuck it on to watch a few minutes at the start cos we had to go to bed.... we thought... but we were hooked and watched, laughing all the way through, they laughed more than me cos, although the subtitles were generally solid there was the occasional suboptimal line and, of course, some puns can't be fully translated without losing something and some references were lost on me as a non-Russian. But whatever, if you haven't seen it, you should check it out.
As a footnote, the next day we decided to check out another film by the same director (Roman Kachanov) called Down House - an adaptation of The Idiot. Also worth watching with the same mind clearly behind a lot of the humour but it seemed to me that the very narrowness of the army film, the fact that it was limited to a certain number of locations and characters worked to focus the film like a laser beam. In Down House the film was free to roam wherever it chose and if anything this was to its detriment.