...Her son-in-law, Ippolit Matwejewitch Worobjaninow, is a former nobleman and a dandy who is currently wasting away as a small town magistrate in charge of civil marriages. He eagerly takes up the quest to find the treasure. Meanwhile, over the years, the twelve chairs have been dispersed all over the country. However, Worobjaninow is not the only one in pursuit of the treasure. Hot on its trail are Ostap Bender, a clever and colorful conman, as well as Father Fjodor, a priest to whom the wealthy aristocrat has also confessed her secret. Thus begins a wild chase that ranges from North to South, West to East, across water and land, from the country to the city.

”Kira Muratova, the grande dame of Eastern European cinema returns with her richest, most imposing vision of societal decay and personal efflorescence since The Aesthenic Syndrome encapsulated a very different moment in the former Soviet Union's history in 1989. Set largely in the vast central railway station of Kiev, a casino, a shopping arcade and the snow-blanketed streets between, Melody is a majestically realised pageant of the burgeoning new economy of inequality. Like Dickensian orphans or children in a fairytale, a motherless brother and sister arrive in the city and traipse through festive Christmas streets looking for their respective fathers…
The heedless adults who rush around them are endowed with varying blends of self-preoccupation, larceny, skepticism, boredom, gluttony, panic, but even at their most appalling these caricatures of urban insanity are disturbingly, sometimes even hilariously familiar. Muratova's vision of 21st-century decadence is thrilling in its ripe theatricality and self-conscious dramatic heft, yet its thunderous damnation could awaken the most jaded soul. This deeply unfashionable film is some kind of masterpiece.” – BG at tvnz.co.nz/new-zealand-international-film-festival/