Original title: Vechera na khutore bliz Dikanki

Also known as The Night Before Christmas, this surreal Christmas fantasy was directed by Aleksandr Rou, a prolific director of fairy tales that were hugely popular in his native Russia. Based on the 1832 short story Noch pered Rozhdestvom/Christmas Eve by Nikolai Gogol, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka is short (just 69 minutes) but manages to cram an extraordinary amount into that meagre running time.

In the 19th century in the village of Dikanka, Oksana (Lyudmyla Myznikova) is an attractive young woman, but vain and somewhat cruel to her suitor, village blacksmith Vakula (Yuri Tavrov). She flirts outrageously with other men and rebuffs Vakula’s proposal of marriage unless he can bring her a pair of shoes belonging to the Tsarina while visiting St Petersburg. The Devil (Georgy Millyar) is meanwhile abroad in the village, tormenting the locals. He swims into space, burning his hands on the moon as he steals it and brings a blizzard down on the village. Solokha (Lyudmyla Khityayeva), Vakula’s mother, is secretly a witch in cahoots with the Devil and on Christmas Eve is visited by a string of would-be suitors, the Devil among them. Vakula argues with her and leaves, taking the Devil with him and with the help of a rural sorcerer (Mykola Yakovchenko) is able to subdue the Devil and use him to fly him to St Petersburg where he charms the Tsarina into giving up her coveted slippers. But back in the village, rumours are rife that he either drowned or hanged himself and Oksana is heartbroken and wracked with guilt. Can there be a happy ending for the mismatched couple?

Well of course there can. This is a fairy tale after all so that hardly seems like much of a spoiler. The details of the story may be unfamiliar (it’s steeped in Ukrainian myth and legend) but the mechanics are the same and the purpose of the story – a morality tale with a simple message accessible by anyone – is little different to folk tales from anywhere else in the world. Both chronologically and technologically, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka is closer to the work of Georges Méliès than it is to modern fantasy films and is all the more charming for it. Special effects are plentiful but crude, but they work in the context of the story, a loopy fairy tale told with considerable charm and eccentricity. There’s an endearing naivete to it, from its brief animated sequences to its shots of a witch flying around on a broomstick plucking stars from the sky or Vakula astride the Devil flying to St Petersburg.

It’s a very odd film and most certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste – the more slapstick elements, of which there are plenty, might alienate many, but its attraction is that it offers a very different view of the Yuletide season to virtually anything else being made at the time, or indeed since. During the Soviet era, Christmas wasn’t celebrated – or if it was, it tended to be quietly and without much fanfare – with New Year’s Eve being the focus of festivities instead. The Snow Queen and Jack Frost, both popular subjects for Soviet-era film, bring presents at the start of the new year and what passes for Christmas was generally observed on 7 January.

So, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka offers an insight into a very different world, one in which the traditional image of the Christian Devil is subverted, for example, rendered here as a silly and petty little creature, hairy, pig-snouted and monkey-tailed, more a malicious prankster than the ultimate force of evil. There’s very little here that westerners would recognise from a traditional film, but that’s what makes Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka all that more fascinating, an alternative to the perhaps over-familiar Christmas film canon.

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka was popular with children on Russian television throughout the 1970s and 1980s though parents might today baulk at the strange, proto-sex-comedy silliness that occassionally surfaces. In one extended skit, Solokha receives a string of horny male visitors on Christmas Eve, each of them having to hide in sacks as new guests arrive. It’s pure farce and all that’s missing is a jaunty musical cue in the vein of Eric Rogers’ work on the British Carry On films.

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka may feel a little over-stretched at times, even with a relatively short running time (there’s a lot of knockabout silliness making up the minutes), but it’s a lovely if decidedly odd little film. If something a bit off the beaten track is needed for your Christmas viewing, this eccentric oddity may fit the bill nicely, offering a glimpse of traditions and folklore almost completely alien to western viewers. Rou made a specialism of this sort of thing. He worked largely for the Soyuzdetfilm studio (later the Gorky Film Studio) where he made over twenty films in this vein, adapting Gogol, Petr Yershov, and Vitali Gubarev. Along with Aleksandr Ptushko, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Lev Atamanov et al, Rou helped to encourage something of a boom in interest in traditional Russian folklore in the 1960s with his films and he was working right up to his untimely death at the age of just 67 in 1973, while he was preparing Finist – Yasnyy sokol/Finist the Brave Falcon, another ambitious fantasy film. It was completed by Gennady Vasilyev and finally released in 1976. In the west, his most famous work may be another seasonal tale, the classic Morozko/Jack Frost (1964) – ignore its ignominious relegation to the ranks of films sneered at by the odious Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-), it’s a much better film than that suggests.