Leningrad Cowboys Go America

Sweden, Finland

1989

78 Min

Color

1.85:1

English, Finnish

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

PROD Aki Kaurismäki, Katinga Faragò, Klas Olofsson

SCR Aki Kaurismäki, Sakke Järvenpää, Mato Valtonen

CAST Matti Pellonpää, Kari Väänänen, Sakke Järvenpää, Heikki Keskinen, Pimme Korhonen, Silu Seppälä, Mauri Sumén, Mato Valtonen, Pekka Virtanen, Jim Jarmusch, Richard Boes

PROD DES Kari Laine, Heikki Ukkonen

SOUND Jouko Lumme, Kjell Westman

Berlinale (Forum), Toronto, New York

Synopsis

A struggling Siberian rock band leaves the lonely tundra to tour the United States because, as they are told, “they put up with anything there.” Aki Kaurismäki’s winningly aloof farce follows the men as they bravely make their way across the New World, carrying a coffin full of beer and sporting hairdos like unicorn horns. Leningrad Cowboys Go America was such a sensation that the band gained a real-life cult following. –The Criterion Collection

Director

Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki did a wide variety of jobs including postman, dish-washer and film critic, before forming a production and distribution company, Villealfa (in homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965)) with his older brother Mika Kaurismäki, also a film-maker. Both Aki and Mika are prolific film-makers, and together have been responsible for one-fifth of the total output of the Finnish film industry since the early 1980s, though Aki’s work has found more favour abroad. His films are very short (he says a film should never run longer than 90 minutes, and many of his films are nearer 70), eccentric parodies of various genres (road movies, film noir, rock musicals), populated by lugubrious hard-drinking Finns and set to eclectic soundtracks, typically based around ‘50s rock’n’roll.

In the 1990s he has made films in Britain (I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)) and France (La vie de bohème (1992)). —IMDb

Wall

Displaying 4 of 5 wall posts.

see all

Kaushik

6May11

Rock and Roll is Dead. It died 1989, I think it was in Leningrad. It was born again 1994 (in the spirit of the Frozen Bass Player) , when Rock and Roll met Moses in Mexico. It finally met its end in 1998 when it ventured into L.A. Without a Map. Rock and Roll is rumored too have originated in Finland with 11 Cowboys and two Leningrad Ladies.

cakewithlegs and Wu Yong like this