Gogol meets Chaplin in this riotous, scathingly antibureaucratic satire, one of the eccentric high points of Soviet silent cinema, filled with expressionist décor, askew camera angles, and even puppetry and animation.
There is an intended contrast throughout between the vivid colors and modern touches of the vaguely Victorian costumes, designed by Mr. Pelly, and Chantal Thomas's rather abstract sets, with their askew floors and angles.
When angled horizontally, they suggest strips of film bearing identical (or near-identical) sequences but running at different speeds, all of them too fast for any image-content to be made out; when angled askew, they suggest out-of-focus close-ups of a bathmat or worn carpet – or, perhaps, aerial views, similarly out-of-focus, of a gridded city.
Elsewhere in the town, cars and pickup trucks sat askew at odd angles after being tossed like toys.
Their framing is random and their angles are askew; sometimes a wing feather obscures the view.
In the far corner, in a chair angled slightly askew, sat Christine C. Quinn, speaker of the City Council for seven years and the politician who has been, depending on your vantage, either the mayor's most loyal partner or most powerful critic, and who had, not coincidentally, since she assumed the job, the best odds to succeed him in City Hall.
In these paintings Degas takes a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" view of ballet, seeing it askew, from a distance, at an angle from which it was never intended to be viewed.
The interior is refreshingly free of Asian kitsch, although the décor comes across as more designy than designed: biomorphic lipstick-orange leather chairs, ceiling fixtures that resemble giant toothbrush heads, china and cups with angles that are aggressively askew.
The wig slightly askew, the part aimed off at an angle as if to divert.
The kitchen cabinets are gently askew, and the living room ceilings are at an angle.
