A Reason To Live Amid Loss

You take one look at the bags under the eyes of the lead character in “A Friend of the Deceased,” and you know he wants to kill himself.

Anatoli has a full plate of reasons for suicide: His girlfriend dumped him, he’s a washed-up intellectual, he has no job, he lives in a dump in Ukraine, and he appears to be friendless. On the plus side, he does have the kind of soulful brown eyes that - in foreign films, anyway - usually indicate there’s a big, passionate affair on the horizon.

Anatoli hires a hit man to bump him off (with all the mournful piano solos playing on the soundtrack, you may think about hiring your own hit man), but then the passionate affair comes through and Anatoli finds some money, so he tries to cancel the hit.

“A Friend of the Deceased” is a genuinely odd movie. There is a plot, but you keep losing track of it as intriguing characters pop up to make an impression and disappear, including two hired killers, a wacky prostitute and a guy who owns a quaint little shop that sells breath mints and contraband.

By the end of “A Friend of the Deceased,” there’s so much grayness and loss that everybody in Ukraine seems to be wondering if life is worth living, but it’s not a somber movie. There are flashes of mordant humor, and there’s a powerful sense that, even when your government is collapsing and your personal life is falling apart, there is still some beauty and hope left in the world.

That message is a sneaky one. You don’t notice how much Anatoli is changing until the final minutes of this languid, uneven movie, when you realize the guy who was preparing to end his life has discovered a reason to live.

“A Friend of the Deceased” Location: Lincoln Heights Cinema Art Credits: Directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich, starring Alexandre Lazarev, Tatiana Krivitska, Eugen Pachin, Contantin Kostychin, Elena Korikova, Angelika Nevolina, Sergiy Romanyuk Running time: 1:40 Rating: R