Like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Georgiy Daneliya’s 1986 film Kin-dza-dza! is, at bottom, biting social satire disguised as dystopian science fiction. Deploying unabashedly absurdist humor, both films decry the alienating effects of bureaucracy, abhor the arbitrary terrors imposed by an authoritarian regime, and exhibit a fascination with the makeshift nature of technology in their respective brave new worlds. While taking cues from contemporary events in the Soviet Union, Kin-dza-dza! nevertheless expands the scope of its satire to include not only Western capitalism, but, more importantly for its staying power, the follies and failings of our shared humanity.
Kin-dza-dza! also reveals a certain kinship with Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series since both feature clueless humans being whisked off on interplanetary adventures that force them to confront bizarre and often byzantine customs and regulations. At the start of Kin-dza-dza!, construction manager Vladiimir “Uncle Vova” Mashkov (Stanislav Lyubshin) and Georgian student Gedevan Alexidze (Levan Gabriadze) find themselves abruptly teleported from a Moscow street corner to the desert world of Pluke in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy after meeting a shoeless beggar (Anatoli Serenko) who claims to be an alien.
The first beings that these two men encounter on Pluke are your prototypical slapstick team: tall and thin Bi (Yuri Yakovlev) and short, stout Uef (Yevgeny Leonov). Sure enough, much of the film’s humor (and some of its unexpected pathos) stems from Bi and Uef’s antics. Although they seem to be peers, they actually represent the two halves of Pluke’s rigidly hierarchical society, whose differences are signaled by seemingly absurd details. For example, the lower-class Patsaks wear tiny bells in their noses and must kowtow to their Chatlanian superiors.
Kin-dza-dza!’s satire calls out various aspects of Soviet life. The planet’s caste differences highlight the officially unacknowledged but all too real inequality between the living conditions of the ruling oligarchy, with their ill-gotten luxuries and amenities, and the proletariat who had to queue up for hours for a single loaf of bread. As in Soviet life, economic conditions on Pluke are based on barter and black marketeering. Differences in caste also point up the racism aimed by native Russians against “secondary citizens” from other supposedly autonomous Soviet republics like Georgia, which was the homeland of both the film’s director and screenwriter.
The local constabulary aren’t much help either. The etsilops (the Russian word for “police” spelled backwards) turn up in their metallic eggs only long enough to take a few bribes and lash out at random with their fancy weaponry. The desert conditions of Pluke are revealed to have been due to environmental mismanagement when all the planet’s available water was converted into fuel—a direct reference to the drying up of the Aral Sea as a result of Soviet “engineering.” This sort of ecological concern places Kin-dza-dza! in a direct line with Dune, only minus all the religious mumbo jumbo. The absence of a religious dimension also marks it out from the similar narrative contours of Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God.
Daneliya and co-writer Revaz Gabriadze concoct an entirely made-up language for the residents of Pluke. The filmmakers go so far as to include an on-screen glossary of Plukian terms at the halfway point in Kin-dza-dza! As the use of the word etsilops above indicates, many of these neologisms have some basis in the Russian or Georgian languages. This sort of linguistic innovation is reminiscent of Anthony Burgess’s creation of the teen slang Nadsat for A Clockwork Orange, which was also cribbed at least in part from Russian.
To label Kin-dza-dza! as black comedy or satire isn’t to deny the affective charge that the film manages to build up. Despite Bi and Uef’s constant betrayal and abandonment of them, Uncle Vova and Gedevan forego their own homecoming in order to go back and save the Plukians from an eternity of living as vegetables under the care of the ethereal Alphans, whose leader, Abradox, is played by Daneliya himself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Plukians’ salvation isn’t followed by a heartwarming moment where they express their heartfelt gratitude. In fact, the abruptness with which that scene ends is in itself a sort of punchline.
The film’s finale loops back to the beginning, but this is no dream. This is akin to a temporal reset. When Uncle Vova and Gedevan meet again for the first time on that street corner, there’s a spark of recognition between them, an acknowledgement of their shared history. Kin-dza-dza! seems to suggest that, despite all the doctrinal flukes of a planet like Pluke, let alone our insignificance in the face of vast interstellar abysses, the transitory, frangible bonds of basic humanity may be the only thing we have to cling on to.
Image/Sound
Sourced from a 4K restoration of the original camera negative and sound elements prepared by Mosfilm, Deaf Crocodile’s 1080p HD release of Kin-dza-dza! looks fantastic. The transfer sports vibrant colors, rich textures, easily discernible fine details of the steampunk-inflected costume and décor, and even some decent depth to the image. Audio comes in a solid LPCM mono mix that agreeably delivers the at times bizarre score from composer Gia Kancheli.
Extras
An engaging commentary track by film critic Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central provides a compelling close reading of Georgiy Daneliya’s film, teases out its connections to contemporary events in the Soviet Union, and convincingly argues the relevance of the film’s satire and social commentary for our own time. Deaf Crocodile co-founder Dennis Bartok interviews actor Levan “Leo” Gabriadze about his experiences on Kin-dza-dza!, the initial conception of the film as “Treasure Island in space,” the often arduous shooting conditions, and his working relationship with director Daneliya. Gabriadze also discusses the life and career of his father, the film’s co-writer, Revaz “Rezo” Gabriadze, including the political and artistic freedom the elder Gabriadze enjoyed while exploring his abiding love of puppet theater.
Elsewhere, in an epic 80-minute confab, Bartok and comics artist and film historian Stephen R. Bissette take a fascinating deep dive into the genre of Russian “fantastika,” mentioning along the way filmmakers like Aleksandr Ptushko and Alexander Rou. They also make note of the films that Roger Corman or AIP bought and drastically reedited for American audiences, a process that turned Ptushko’s Sadko into The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (with a script “adapted” by a young Francis Ford Coppola). Interspersed with contributions from David A. Cook (author of A History of Narrative Film), the video essay “Of Vodka and Vinegar” from cult film expert Dr. Will Dodson provides some helpful background to the historical events behind Kin-dza-dza!, the structure of the Soviet film industry, and the state of Georgian cinema. Finally, the enclosed booklet contains an essay from Justin Humphreys on the film’s satirical lineage.
Overall
Bittersweet satire posing as postapocalyptic science fiction, Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-dza-dza! has as much to say about today as it does the last gasps of the Soviet Union.
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