Kin-Dza-Dza!
At a glance...
- Directed by Georgiy Daneliya
- Released in 1986
- Runtime 135 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: koo! (this is so fantastic!)
Ok so my girlfriend and I messed up and watched disc 2 of the 2-part DVD instead of starting at disc 1. In my defense I just kinda figured maybe it was a purposeful thing to have an opening "credits" that just is a bunch of loose translations of fictional alien words.
We did watch the first half eventually, but I'm kinda thinking maybe just watching the second half is the way to go? I want to run a social experiment where I get one group of people to watch this film normal and one group to watch it silly-style and compare the 2 group's average feelings of this movie. If you start from the top, Kin-Dza-Dza! is a comedic science-fiction film where our hapless comrades ultimately find themselves in a deeply sick world that is obsessed with arbitrary ethnic hierarchies and wealth accumulation. And if you watch just the second half, Kin-Dza-Dza! is instead...a comedic science-fiction film where our hapless comrades ultimately find themselves in a deeply sick world that is obsessed with arbitrary ethnic hierarchies and wealth accumulation.
The difference is that, by watching just the second half, you are not told these facts explicitly. I figured out all these themes by the end, but the first half of the second half is so abstracted from language that it is maybe the most alien an alien species has ever felt on screen. This knocks the jizz-wailing cantina creatures out of the park. The alien language is so sparse and you learn of it so quickly in the first few minutes (of the second half) that everything feels right in that liminal space between understanding and pure linguistic chaos. I truly felt like a xenoanthropologist, slowly putting together these social cues in tandem with our intrepid humans.
I have no idea if this strange accident of mine has been discussed by previous viewers of this film in history. For me, it still felt like a totally complete experience, and by the end when I finally saw the denizens of Pluke for what they really were, I felt like a mad genius. Maybe the most emotional part for me is when Uncle Vova leaves the ship and sits on the ground of the lifeless, de-oxygenated planet between Pluke and Earth in protest. He would rather suffocate to death than participate in the colonization and exploitation of this faraway place, and it's not long before the violinist joins him shrouded in blue.
Of the pair of Mosfilm productions that I've seen they have both given me this deeply humane sense of empathy with the characters and with my fellow humans, and this film astonishingly accomplished that with a limited vocabulary and deeply abstracted environments. That first scene with the faraway balloon looming in the distance with the big pipes going into it left me awe-struck; I will be thinking of that image specifically for a long time. Science fiction feels unstoppable when viewed like this because the genre becomes a vessel for pure imaginative impulse. It's why I just didn't care about the Dune remake. Are we here to perfectly recreate the most marketable faces and weapons on the screen to make things feel "real", or are we going to risk baffling an audience using what is within our reach to get to a meaningfully alien place? All I have to say about that is koo!