LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES
[Spoilers]
A film review by Risto Pohjonen
Copyright 1994 Risto Pohjonen
Aki Kaurism{ki's new Leningrad Cowboys movie, LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES was released in Finland on last Friday (25th of February). The movie got its premiere earlier in the film festival in Berlin with Kaurism{ki's other Cowboys film, TOTAL BALALAIKA SHOW, which is a documentary about the concert of Leningrad Cowboys and Vladimirov's Red Army Choir in Helsinki last summer. LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES got pretty lousy reviews from Berlin and in the Finnish press. It was said that the worst rock'n'roll group in the world got the movie that is worth the band. Mr. Kaurism{ki got so unsatisfied with the reviews that he said that he will quit making movies or at least take a long holiday. We will see.
Well, was it all that bad? Yes and no. It is understandable that people don't like comedy that is not funny at all. The humour in LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES is very black and most of the time the movie is just melancholic, not amusing. But still, LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES has its points.
The story begins in Mexico, where the band has spent last five years. Most of the musicians have died in Tequila and the last members who are still alive have degenerated to desperadoes. The band gets an opportunity for a concert in New York. There they meet Moses, who is an incarnation of their former manager Vladimir Kuzim. Moses has a ground-breaking idea: the band has to make an exodus back to their home Siberia. But they have to take some presents with them and that's why Moses steals the nose from the Statue of Liberty. With the nose Moses and the band cross the Atlantic ocean. In France they meet their cousins from Siberia and start their journey across France, Germany and Poland to Russia....
The first half of the movie is actually boring as hell. Nothing really happens and the band performs only one song (which is quite funny, though). Things get better when they get to the Europe. The movie gets more "road movie" like feeling and there are more music performances. The songs in general aren't as good as they were in LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA, but there some really good pieces, like "The Rivers of Babylon" and a great rock'n'roll song performed by the French (?) actor, who's playing a CIA agent, who is trying to get back the nose of the statue (and who turns to prophet Elijah in the middle of the movie :-). There are also many traditional Russian folk songs performed more or less traditional way. IMHO, the best song was the version of Finnish lullaby "The Goblin and the Sun Ray"--damn, it almost made me cry.
Matti Pellonp{{ (who played the part of the despotic manager Vladimir in LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA) steals the whole show with his Moses/Vladimir character. Moses resembles still more the manager Vladimir than the biblical Moses, specially when his giving such funny biblical interpretations like "Jesus saves, Moses invests" or (after giving five loaves of breads to the band) "I have only two fishes, so I am eating them myself." But there is also the "holy" side in this character: when one of the members of the band gets sick in Poland, Moses shows some humanity.
There are also many funny details for people with knowledge about the Bible, Marxist philosophy, and the movies. There is a hilarious scene where Moses and the musician called Lenin are quoting The Bible and Marx & Engels' "Manifesto of the Communist Party" in the Hauptbahnhof of Leipzig! The other funny scene was Moses with the burning bush (which is lit with gasoline :-)). Director Kaurism{ki appears in a short scene that has to be a direct quote from Chaplin's THE MODERN TIMES.
Maybe the greatest disadvantage of LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES is the non-existence of the plot. Of course there was no plot in LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA either, but the jokes kept the things together better. Maybe Kaurism{ki wanted to say something about the state of the world with this movie, but I would ask the question, is this kind of comedy the best way to do it? When Kaurism{ki makes his romantic conclusion at the end of the movie, one can't help the feeling that the director is fighting in a war that is already lost.
Still, I would say that LENINGRAD COWBOYS MEET MOSES is better than its reputation and give it three stars [***] out of the five, because we should keep in mind that:
"BUSINESS IS BUSINESS, BUT MOSES IS MOSES"
-- - Risto 'Rise' Pohjonen (rtpo@jyu.fi)
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