Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses

Finland, Germany, France

1994

94 Min

Color

1.85:1

Finnish, English

Currently 3.1/5 Stars.
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EXEC Reinhard Brundig, Paula Oinonen, Fabienne Vonier

SCR Aki Kaurismäki, Sakke Järvenpää, Mato Valtonen

CAST Matti Pellonpää, Nicky Tesco, Sakke Järvenpää, Silu Seppälä, Ekke Niiva, Pemo Ojala, Kari Väänänen, Mato Valtonen, Twist-Twist Erkinharju, Ben Granfelt, Jore Marjaranta, Jyri Närvänen, Mauri Sumén, André Wilms, Jacques Blanc, Nicole Helies, Kirsi Tykkyläinen, Aki Kaurismäki

SOUND Timo Linnasalo, Jouko Lumme

Berlinale (Forum), Toronto

Synopsis

Living in Mexico with a top-ten hit under their belts, the Leningrad Cowboys have fallen on hard times. When they move north to rejoin their manager (Kaurismäki mainstay Matti Pellonpää) for a gig in Coney Island, he seems to have turned into a delusional self-proclaimed prophet who wishes to lead them back to the promised land of Siberia. Like the first installment, Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses is a road movie, but this time the humorous hardships come from the rocky terrain of the new Europe. –The Criterion Colection

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