Corporate Party

Corporate Party / Корпоратив

Published: July 13, 2016

Corporate Party (Корпоратив) is a 2014 Russian comedy by Oleg Asadulin, who also directed Dark World: Equilibrium (Тёмный мир: равновесие). The film was produced by the company Enjoy Movies, which seeks to specifically make domestic hits about Russian everyday life so that audiences have viewing options apart from Western imports.

In the filme, Igor, the senior manager of a furniture store, holds a company party for his coworkers at the store. The next day, he finds that the store has been completely trashed. He asks his coworkers what happened, but they all swear that everything was fine when they left the party. Fearing for his job, Igor starts investigating what happened, and as each partygoer describes their night after they left the party, he finds out some strange things about the people he works with.

The film got generally abysmal ratings from both critics and viewers, although it did fairly well at the box office. Audiences criticized the acting in particular. Reviews were so negative in such creative ways that reading them may be more entertaining than actually watching the film. The Village wrote that the screenwriters seemed to think that the audience wasn’t very smart and that there were very few funny scenes, despite the actors’ comedic credentials. The review also noted that the soundtrack was completely outdated—“if they think that people still dance to these songs in the regions, then we have bad news for them.” Film.ru was more positive, saying that in each of the six mini-stories there was something amusing and bizarre, and that it was perfect for contemporary viewers. Ruskino praised the film’s attempt to depict contemporary Russian life—and, for what it’s worth, the reviewer enjoyed the soundtrack—but found that it didn’t remotely fulfill its comedic expectations and the cinematography didn’t look realistic.

Director: Oleg Asadulin
Stars: Nikolai Naumov, Vladimir Tolokonnikov, Miroslava Karpovich, Andrey Fedortsov, Aristarkh Venes
Production company: Enjoy Movies
Box office take: $4.8 million

Official trailer:

Corporate Party

About the author

Julie Hersh

Julie studied Russian as a Second Language in Irkutsk and before that, Bishkek, with SRAS's Home and Abroad Scholarship program, with the goal of someday having some sort of Russia/Eurasia-related career. She recently got her master’s degree from the University of Glasgow and the University of Tartu, where she studied women’s dissent in Soviet Russia. She also has a bachelor’s degree in literature from Yale. Some of her favorite Russian authors are Sorokin, Shishkin, Il’f and Petrov, and Akhmatova. In her spare time Julie cautiously practices martial arts, reads feminist websites, and taste-tests instant coffee for her blog.

Program attended: Home and Abroad Scholar

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