"Only fifty minutes to go until the end of the world, please head to the check-out!", thus goes the instruction that rings out from the loudspeakers of a Moscow supermarket. When cashier Gulya shuts up the shop and resolves to prepare for the apocalypse, a naked individual appears from amongst the aisles to claim that he has arrived from the future with the task of saving the planet. Originally from Bishkek, Gulya is supposedly the chosen mother of the savior, whom he, Alexander Merkuriev, is to impregnate. The morning after however it soon becomes clear that Alexander ended up in the wrong supermarket with the wrong Gulya. The right Gulya, who is actually from Tashkent, cannot keep the revelation to herself on learning of her destiny, and wastes no time in breaking the story to the media. This in turn proves such a sensation that even the Presidential Administration of Russia gets involved. All involved are soon brought back to earth however when a headmistress from a provincial...
The story happens mainly around "The Old Arbat Street" in the center of Moscow, where always concentrate vendors, poor young artists and musicians. The hero of this film is a boy named Mitiya,who lives with eccentric elder friend in an apartment house on "The Old Arbat". In fact, people who then appear around Mitiya are all unique, eccentric and the space of the apartment house begins to have an unrealistic character as a miniature of unstable society in the end of Soviet Union.
Alika Aldanova - the heroine of the cult film "ASSA", who twenty-two years ago killed her lover Andrei Krymov - is released from prison where she has given birth to a daughter. Her new life holds in store some complex twists of fate. A well-known director invites Alika to act in the film "Anna Karenina"...
Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".
ASSA is set in Crimea during the winter in the mid eighties. A young musician (Bananan) falls for mobster's (Krymov) young mistress (Alika). The parallel story line involves an 18th century assassination plot.