Anyone looking for a metaphor for the 21st century might try a psychiatric asylum in a war zone, according to Andrei Konchalovsky, the Russian-born director of House of Fools, a fresh, unnervingly relevant take on war's insanity that opens Friday at art houses in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The film, which won two awards at the Venice Film Festival, had its U.S. premiere Thursday at the Russian International Film Festival in Hollywood.

As director Milos Forman did in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975, Konchalovsky (1985's Oscar-nominated Runaway Train) presents a picture of asylum inmates who are basically as capable, lovable and troubled as those in the world outside. Konchalovsky took his story from a news item he saw on TV in 1996: Patients at an isolated psychiatric hospital on the Russia-Chechnya border had been abandoned by medical staff as Russian troops approached. Shot in an asylum in 2001 with real patients as characters, the film depicts the complications of love, both real and imagined, amid the chaos of bombs, gunfire and inter-troop politics.

House of Fools turns Cuckoo's Nest inside out, opined the Moscow-based Konchalovsky, who was in L.A. for the premiere. "In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, everybody wanted to run away, to run to the freedom," he said. "In our century, it looks like people would like to hide, not run away, because the world is more insane than the institution."

Konchalovsky has had his own struggles with freedom. Born into a family of artists and poets, he was disillusioned after he moved to the United States in 1980, hoping to make it in Hollywood. Despite the success of Runaway Train, his other films, such as 1989's Homer & Eddie and 1991's The Inner Circle, were box-office disappointments. Although Konchalovsky had artistic and commercial success with a TV miniseries based on Homer's The Odyssey, he said Hollywood studios aren't really interested in the sort of nuanced films he likes to make. Working here was a "constant struggle between budget and freedom," he said. "I left Hollywood when I realized success is not big numbers but the next film you want to do."

The $2.5-million House of Fools, financed in part by a French friend, producer Rene Cleitman, has less polish than a typical Hollywood film. What it did have was something more dear to Konchalovsky. "I had absolute freedom. I made all the decisions."