But, again, it’s nothing more than a hilarious stringing together of gags and references to literature and film. Among the many things skewered are the famous steps scene in Battleship Potemkin, and Bergman’s film Persona’s juxtaposition of two female faces when Sonja and her cousin (Jessica Harper) muse on death. Bergman is also prevalent in the hilarious final scene of Boris dancing off with Death, an homage to the end of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Literature takes its lumps, too, as in a parody scene where Boris and another character are speaking philosophically by invoking the names of famous Dostoevsky novels, or where Boris decides to become a poet, and pens the lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock - "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas" - and tosses it into a fire as too sentimental.
Then there is the classic Woody character, complete with his anachronistic eyeglasses, who really is the star of the film, despite bearing the name Boris. As example, Boris/Woody whines when he’s drafted, "I’m not the army type. I slept with the lights on till I was thirty. I can’t shower with other men." Then, he’s shown a parody of an Army training film on VD, except, due to the film’s setting in Napoleon’s era, it’s a hygiene play. Afterwards, when another soldier offers to take Boris to a brothel, he protests, "I went to a brothel once in my life. I got hiccups." Of God, Boris remarks, "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever." But, the best and most subtle dig comes when Boris and a fellow soldier are talking of a dead man being the other soldier’s Village Idiot, and Boris asks, "So what did you do? Place?" Later, he even drops off his own village’s idiot to a Russian National Village Idiots Convention. Another classic bit is when Boris’s brother Ivan dies and his wife and Sonja divvy up his letters, which turn out not to be missives, but vowels and consonants!
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