Kin-dza-dza! (1986)

directed by Georgiy Daneliya

Russia (at the time USSR)

135 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I rewatched this last night and have been holding off on writing a review because this movie is so good and I am so fond of it that I just don't know how to talk about it. In the time since I first saw it, the director has passed away, and while I've heard that his other movies aren't very much like this one, it's still a loss.

I don't often rewatch movies that are this long because of my awful American attention span, but I'm glad that I did, because it exposed something else about it that my Americanness blinded me from seeing, judging by what I wrote about it in my previous review: This entire thing is a satire of capitalism, and it's an absolute riot. Ironically, even though that kind of thing was pretty acceptable in the Soviet Union at the time, this movie did get blacklisted anyway for the possibly-unintentional sin of making the made-up catchall word used by the inhabitants of the planet Pluk (it... kind of makes sense in context) sound too much like the initials of a Communist Party official. But start to finish, everything that happens is a veiled jab at capitalism. In the first five minutes or so, the displaced odd couple of the USSR witnesses an elaborate alien introduction ritual, a spectacle involving crouching and slapping your cheeks a variable number of times depending on the color of the other person's pants, and deduces that they must be in a capitalist country. I took this as just a one-off funny joke the first time I saw it, but it is intended wholly literally. Pluk is a capitalist society, and its inhabitants are brainwashed and blind to it.

There's a mysterious leader that everybody is loyal to whether they're slave laborers in his factory or inhabitants of a far-off desert outpost. There are two distinct classes of people on the planet, and the difference between the two is entirely arbitrary, not based on any physical or material attributes. One gets privileges while the other has to wear a ridiculous little bell on their nose and occasionally kowtow to the other, except on some other planets it's reversed, and then on some planets they both get turned into cactuses. A running theme throughout the movie is that characters are constantly promising each other money but very little money actually ever changes hands. Sometimes it is actual currency, but sometimes it's also matches, which are apparently incredibly valuable on this planet, but with both things, although ridiculous sums are named as prices for simple objects, it all remains a transaction of words alone. At one point, stranded out in the desert, one of the Earthlings offers one of the Pluk folk water, which he initially rejects, but when offered it for free, he accepts- even though they were literally in the middle of nowhere, with no way to physically exchange currency. The whole of Pluk society operates on just inventing value where there is none and promising cash that doesn't exist. It's a spotlight directly on how absurd the concept of money really is.

The reason why this movie works so well as a satire is because it's not a 1:1 mapping of one concept onto another. I see attempts to do this that fail spectacularly because all they do is reverse the situation: Films where being gay is accepted and being straight is demonized, et cetera. Kin-dza-dza is way better than this because it's really just showing things as they literally are- not inverting them, not saying "oh yeah well how would you like it???" Obviously it's absurd and fantastical, but the message at the center is truth. I went on at length about how fully fleshed-out the culture felt the first time I reviewed this, and now looking back on that, I just think "that's because it's your culture, you twit".

And this is no boring grey Soviet propaganda message- it's one of the most visually impressive films of the era, and genuinely a hoot to watch no matter if it's your first time or your fifteenth. It's hysterically funny in any language, and borderline comprehensible even if you don't speak any of the languages spoken in it. It's possible to watch this a dozen times and get something different out of it each time.