Kin-dza-dza! (Russian: Кин-дза-дза!) (1986). Directed by Georgiy Daneliya. Written by Georgiy Daneliya and Revaz Gabriadze. Starring Stanislav Lyubshin, Yevgeni Leonov, Yury Yakovlev, and Levan Gabriadze.
Mad Max meets Monty Python. Brazil meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Samuel Beckett meets Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune. All of those things as directed by Tarkovsky.
Those descriptions and more are what people have had to say about Kin-dza-dza! over the years. You will be forgiven if you have trouble figuring out what any of them mean. I happen to love it when the very earnest, very serious attempts film critics and scholars make to briefly summarize a movie end up revealing almost nothing about what the movie is actually like.
To be fair, I wouldn’t know how to elevator-pitch Kin-dza-dza! either. It’s a film about two men who accidentally get transported across the universe to a desolate desert planet where they have to learn the local customs and become traveling musicians to barter for the materials they need to return to Earth. That is an accurate summary that tells you nothing about the movie.
It’s difficult to find much English-language information about where this film came from, but we can put together a little bit of context. The 1980s were a strange time in Soviet cinema, because the 1980s were a strange time in the Soviet Union. In my previous article about The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981) and Soviet animation, I wrote a bit about the ebb and flow of oppression and censorship during the decades following World War II. Following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the “Kruschev Thaw” led to a brief period of more relaxed government control, but that ended in the mid ’60s. The decades that followed were characterized by a return to repressive conservative policies. That in turn led to a long period of what Mikhail Gorbachev would later call the “Era of Stagnation,” during which an aging, corrupt, and increasingly out of touch political class would obsess over censoring critics, stamping out any vaguely permissive social ideas, and throwing vast amounts of money at the military for the purposes of asserting dominance. (Let’s all pause here to turn and stare directly and knowingly at the camera.) The result was an inevitable and entirely predictable situation in which a great many people were deeply dissatisfied with life in the Soviet Union in the years leading up to its dissolution.
In Soviet cinema, the government censorship of films didn’t really begin to ease until the mid ’80s; Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and instituted a policy of glasnost, or openness, which by 1987 would lead to a couple hundred previously censored films being released.
That puts this Kin-dza-dza! in the peculiar position of being a fairly obviously political film that was made and released right on the cusp of when growing dissatisfaction tipped over into monumental changes. Director Georgiy Daneliya was no stranger to making films with political themes, although it wasn’t what he was known for—nor was science fiction.
By the ’80s Daneliya had been making movies for more than twenty years. He first gained significant attention with his third film, the lighthearted romantic comedy Walking the Streets of Moscow (1963), which was inspired by the films of the French New Wave and therefore a marked contrast to the fashionable Soviet realism of the time.
But his follow-up film, the comedy Thirty-Three (1965), was immediately banned for being too obvious a satire on the social politics of the era. Digging just a tiny bit into what was so objectionable about Thirty-Three is a pointed lesson in the ridiculousness and fragility behind government censorship. The movie is about a man who is catapulted to national fame when it’s discovered that he has 33 teeth rather than 32. Hijinks ensue, including a scene in which a motorcade escorts the man into Moscow. This annoyed Mikhail Suslov, the “unofficial chief idealogue” of the Community Party, who saw that scene as a disrespectful parody of a recent public event in which cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov were escorted by motorcade. Some sources suggest that Gagarin and Leonov were personally offended by the scenes, while others suggest that it all came from Suslov. Either way, Suslov asked Daneliya to remove the scene, Daneliya refused, and Suslov had the film removed from theaters two weeks after its release. Just to reiterate: this is a movie about the experiences of a man who becomes famous for having an extra tooth. However, Suslov didn’t succeed in vanishing the film; Daneliya would later say that a great many people managed to watch his “banned” film even before it was released in the ’80s as part of the glasnost reforms.
It also didn’t harm his career. Daneliya would go on to make a number of well-received films. He was known for his “sad comedies,” or films that mix comedy with emotional stories, many of which were pretty successful. So it’s not entirely clear why Daneliya made the sharp left turn into absurdist sci fi satire with Kin-dza-dza! According to at least one article, Daneliya said in interviews and in his autobiography that the idea came from a conversation with Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra (known for his work with filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky) in which Guerra suggested that if Daneliya wanted to appeal to a younger audience, he ought to make a sci fi film with a lot of sunshine to contrast the cold Russian winters.
I haven’t read the autobiography or the referenced interviews, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that is either a joke or only a small part of the real story. There are quite a lot of steps missing between “young people like sci fi and summertime” to, well, all of Kin-dza-dza!
The film opens with a long, slow aerial pan across a desolate desert landscape. At this point any former geologists in the audience (i.e., me) will immediately pause the movie to look up where it was filmed, although I would have learned it from the movie itself with a bit of patience. That’s the Karakum Desert that makes up more than two-thirds of the land area of Turkmenistan, which gained independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. If any former geologists in the audience go on to further indulge their curiosity about the Karakum Desert, they will immediately learn about the infamous Darvaza gas crater. Sometime in the ’60s or ’70s, a natural gas reservoir collapsed on itself, and in a questionable attempt to clean up the gas before it escaped, Soviet geologists set the gas in the crater on fire. (Local sources and international sources don’t agree on the details of the crater’s formation or the fire’s origin.) It has been burning ever since, although in the past few years there have been attempts to put the fire out, in spite of it being—from what I can tell—basically the only internationally-acknowledged tourist attraction in the entire country.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the movie we’re talking about. It’s not mentioned in the film. I am only sharing it because it is a giant flaming hole in the ground, and I think we can all appreciate that.
We’ll get back to the movie now. (But in the backs of our minds we will still be contemplating the giant flaming hole in the ground.)
After the stark desert scenery of the credits sequence, we shift very briefly to ’80s Moscow. A construction foreman by the name of Vladimir Nikolayevitch Mashkov (played by Stanislav Lyubshin) returns home from work, only to have his wife (played by the film’s assistant director Galina Daneliya-Yurkova, who was also the director Daneliya’s wife) send him out to the store for some bread and macaroni. While he’s out, he is approached by a young Georgian student, Gedevan Alexandrovitch Alexidze (Levan Gabriadze, who was 17 when he was cast), who draws his attention to a scruffy and seemingly lost man in need of help.
Note: In the film the two main characters are often referred to by each other and strangers as “Uncle Vova” and “Skripach,” the latter of which means “violinist” as part of a prolonged joke that Gedevan cannot play the violin he’s carrying. For simplicity’s sake I’m going to call them Vova and Gedevan.
That stranger claims to be an alien from outer space who needs to know where he’s at in order to return home. Naturally, neither Vova nor Gedevan believe him. To humor him before fetching some authorities, Vova pushes a button on the stranger’s handheld device. That’s how Vova and Gedevan find themselves transported across the universe to the desert planet of Pluke in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy.
What follows is a series of bizarre, humorous, and ridiculous misadventures as Vova and Gedevan try to figure out a way to get back home. The first people they meet on Pluke are Bi (Yury Yakovlev) and Uef (Yevgeny Leonov), a pair of wandering musicians, although one might be forgiven for not recognizing them as musicians at first, as what they perform bears very little resemblance to what we think of as music. Miscommunications abound until Bi and Uef somehow adapt (there is telepathy involved) to speaking Russian and Georgian, but being able to understand each other doesn’t really help the characters much. The pair are uninterested in helping Vova and Gedevan until they learn that Vova has something they want: ordinary matches, which in Pluke’s barter culture are incredibly valuable.
But, honestly, the details of the plot are not what matters here. “Some lost guys want to go home” is a classic sci fi premise for a reason, and that’s because it allows for all manner of embellishment and worldbuilding along the way. The real core of the story is in what Vova and Gedevan learn about Pluke culture and how they react to it. When first being asked to barter with Bi and Uef, Vova scornfully dismisses their capitalistic tendencies, but the sharpest edge of the film’s satire is aimed directly at Soviet society.
When introduced to the hierarchy between the lower-class Patsaks and the higher class Chatlanians, the Earthlings point out that the Pluke form of racism is based on nothing except a device that shows lights of a different color when pointed at an individual. The “Ecilopps” (from “police” spelled backwards) are a form of law enforcement, but they are entirely useless, as they only show up to demand bribes, throw their authority around, and shoot people. The people of Pluke have used all of the planet’s water to make fuel, so now they need to extract water from fuel to survive.
It’s important to note that Daneliya was born in Tbilisi to a Georgian family. He wasn’t trying to be subtle when he put a Russian character and a Georgian character next to each other on screen and had them discuss the absurdity of the social hierarchy on Pluke. Nor was he trying to be subtle in parodying the ineffectiveness of corrupt authorities and the callousness of open commerce in which everything is up for sale. The corruption of the authorities, the prevalence of black-market trade, long-harbored resentments between people of different cultural groups and classes…those are all things that characterized everyday life during the waning days of the Soviet Union. In this film, on screen, they are drawn in broad strokes, with every encounter, every nose-bell, every utterance of the all-purpose “koo” and vulgar “kyu” included for maximum outrageousness.
And it’s all played with no indication whatsoever that the characters are aware of the dramatic irony. The film maintains a marvelous deadpan tone all throughout, even during its most outlandish moments, such as when the Vova and Gedevan team up with Bi and Uef to form a musical troupe that performs an ear-splittingly discordant folk song for a group of desert-dwellers who live in a crumbling Ferris wheel.
That tone is key to making the film work; the sharpness of the satire wouldn’t land quite the same way if it were accompanied by wink-wink-nudge-nudge mugging from the actors. The tone serves the same purpose as the desert setting and the limited alien language, in that everything unnecessary is stripped away, which forces us to visit Pluke with only with this collection of too-familiar customs and illogical rules, without leaving enough space for us to squirm away and reassure ourselves that our cultural norms aren’t anything like that. Sci fi is often used to comment on social issues, but Kin-dza-dza! takes it a step further by also parodying that aspect of sci fi while doing the exact same thing.
The movie is very funny, but it’s uncomfortably funny. That’s what happens when you strip humanity and human cultures down to their barest bones to get a look at what’s inside. Quite a lot of what’s in there isn’t pretty—but it’s not all ugly. Even after being cheated and scammed countless times, Vova and Gedevan still do what they can to help Bi and Uef avoid various terrible fates. A more cynical movie would have the Earthlings adopt the Pluke attitudes completely, while a more wishy-washy movie would have them effect some manner of positive change on the planet.
In the end, I’m still puzzling over how I feel about this movie. It’s one of those odd films where I’m very glad to have found it and watched it, and also glad to be able to encourage other people to watch it, but I think the viewing experience was more interesting than enjoyable. I don’t mind that, however, because I love an unexpected venture into cinematic ambivalence.
What do you think about Kin-dza-dza!, and how it goes about using sci fi settings to satirize elements of human society? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Next week: To this day members of my family will spontaneously start singing “Hello! Ma Baby” if somebody orders the special in a restaurant. That’s the kind of impact Spaceballs has had on people of a certain generation. Watch it on MAX, Amazon, and more.
