The Leningrad Cowboy Band is a family with obvious characteristics: they wear sharp jet noses, sharp rocket shoes, black suits and big sunglasses, and they don’t speak much. They live in the frozen land of northern Europe. I froze to death while practicing the piano. This is a family with a strong tradition, the doll in the cradle and the dog at the foot of the table, all with airplane hair permed, and the portrait of the ancestor hanging on the wall is Abraham Lincoln (also with the airplane head permed), although he went to After he came to the United States, there was no news, but he has established this tradition, which is not only familial, but also "national".
The band decided to go to the United States to develop, they drove a tractor, carried the bassist's body through the tundra, walked through the pine forest to the international airport (yes, from the forest to the airport, not by car), by plane When I got to New York, I negotiated a development plan with my agent, and then I was asked to play a try. They put on a deadpan show and got sent ten cents to a wedding in Mexico because their music was too "classical" and now it's disco and rock.
Director Aki Kaurismaki continued to tell this absurd story in a cold and humorous style, incorporating satire and ridicule on world phenomena such as pop culture, politics and cultural discrimination, until the end, the cowboy who was left out by the Americans. The band had three endings in Mexico: the musical success, the resurrection of a democratic team relationship, and the sad departure of the self-serving, authoritarian, mustache manager.
This "The Story of the Cowboys of Leningrad" is less than 80 minutes in length. It has a strong style and is short and attractive. I won't introduce the plot. Here are three things I like very much in the film
. When the hands were sitting around the table in the outdoor fence and drinking beer in a daze, they saw a few people pulling a car engine and walked past. The hands started laughing, laughing for a long time, and didn't stop until they got back to the car and were about to drive away. At this time, they found that the car could not start, opened the hood, and the engine was gone, and they stopped laughing.
The play is very tense. First of all, the joke didn't feel funny at all, but the musicians had a great time. This is a kind of narrow empathy. This group of facially paralyzed musicians traveled from northern Europe to the United States with a straight face, speaking broken English and being aliens, isolated from culture, life and society, and their situation is inherently narrow. This rare pleasure highlights their absurd and real loneliness.
Second, the subject and object of laughter are nested in three levels here. That joke made the musicians laugh, and the musicians' silly experience turned into a joke in the movie that made the audience laugh. The relay of laughter, the musicians stopped laughing, and the audience began to laugh. If the audience starts to laugh foolishly, then it's time for the director to laugh at the audience. But of course Kaurismaki was not trying to laugh at the audience, but satirizing the sarcastic laughter that arises from contempt. These three layers of laughter should only be laughter itself, the real emotion, which can dissolve the rooted emotion of contempt. The protagonist, audience, and director should maintain the consistency of laughter, which is the real equality and democracy. The audience needs to be wary that their laughter turns into a socialist laughter, an ideological laughter.
The second is the mute who followed the cowboys to the United States and Mexico. Dumb is the most vivid and vivid character in the movie, and aphasia is also a key expression. The mute is a symbol that refers to the cowboys' unconscious nostalgia, a necessary emotion to counteract loneliness, and a continuous nostalgic tradition echoing the vanished ancestor Abraham Lincoln and the gas station cousin he met by chance. Dumb's hair is too short, but he really wants to perm an airplane head and become the same person as the musicians. If he can't become it, he will become the person to accompany him. The reason why a dumb person can't speak is that in a foreign context, nostalgia can't be expressed, because when he is lonely and fails, no one will pay attention, and when he is happy when he is successful, no one will sympathize. On a night when the cowboys are starving, Dumb offers his fish—nostalgia is an emotional foundation that saves the cowboys from disappointment.
The third is the corpse of the bass player who was carried across the United States by the cowboys in a coffin with the frozen bass. There are four holes in this coffin, one showing the hair of an airplane, one showing the upright bass, and two showing the rocket shoes. This unscrupulous coffin is so light that one person can carry it around on his shoulders. . This lightness is also the lightness of death, and belongs to the category of weight that comedy can support. If it is heavy, like the coffin in Faulkner's "As I Die", the film will be crushed: it The tone and form are unbearable. But the comic style of the film has its own way of pounding hearts, and it's the Kaurismaki way, or the way it's derived from Beckett, the modern and the classical way.
Two more words, the first sentence, a good movie must be in tune, just like cowboys want to change their "too classical" music and go to play rock and roll to the embarrassing result, find their own tune It is important to express. The second sentence, it is said that this cowboy band is actually a band called "Sleepy Sleepers" in reality. After the success of the film, the band seemed to have found a state and became popular with the shape of an airplane head. In 1994, they and The Russian Red Army Choir (160 people) staged a "Cowboy Hits the Red Army Super Concert" sponsored by Nokia in Helsinki, Finland, which was watched by 70,000 people.
View more about Leningrad Cowboys Go America reviews
