Pregnant

Pregnant / Беременный

Published: July 13, 2016

Pregnant (Беременный) is a 2011 Russian comedy directed by Sarik Andreasyan, who also directed Office Romance: Our Time (Служебный роман. Наше время).

The film is about Sergey, a TV host on a music channel, who is skeptical of anything new or trendy. He and his wife, Diana—played by Anna Sedokova, a popular Russian singer and former member of VIA Gra—are trying to have a baby but haven’t had any luck, until Sergey makes a wish and becomes pregnant himself. Suddenly he believes in miracles, but his friend Zhora suggests that he exploit this one to become famous and rich. They announce the pregnancy on Defender of the Fatherland Day, a major Russian holiday. Sergey starts a TV show called Pregnant and becomes a major star, but of course the situation isn’t that simple in the end.

The film got terrible reviews, although it had a decent enough box-office take to land in Russia’s top five grossing films for the month it was released. It was compared very unfavorably to the American comedy Junior, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. One reviewer, from Rusfilm, noted that at the crowded viewing she attended, hardly anyone laughed. She also called it a “stillborn” project, finding that the characters all acted like “idiots,” the jokes weren’t funny, and the film’s creators ignored the real problems that pregnant people have to contend with.

Director: Sarik Andreasyan
Stars: Dmitri Dyuzhev, Mikhail Galustyan, Anna Sedokova, Svetlana Khodechenkova, Dmitri Sharakois
Production company: Enjoy Movies
Box office take: $7.6 million

Official trailer:

Pregnant

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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