Total Balalaika Show

Finland

1994

57 Min

Color

1.66:1

English, French, Russian, Finnish

Currently 3.1/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

CAST Alexandrov Red Army Ensemble, Atte Blom, Twist-Twist Erkinharju, Ben Granfelt, Sakke Järvenpää, Sakari Kuosmanen, Jore Marjaranta, Ekke Niiva, Pemo Ojala, Silu Seppälä, Mauri Sumén, Kirsi Tykkyläinen, Mato Valtonen

MUSIC B. Alexandrov, Tipe Johnson

Berlinale (Panorama), San Francisco, Toronto, AFI FEST (European Cinema)

Synopsis

Kaurismäki’s documentary of the Leningrad Cowboys’ massive Helsinki Square concert, on Finland’s largest stage, is a loving tribute to the rock band he made famous. Seventy thousand people from Finland and Russia turned out for this megaspectacle, with musical selections, from Sibelius to Bob Dylan, that crossed genre and national divides. And the band was joined onstage by the 150-member Russian Red Army Choir; Variety called it “the most incongruous—and inspired—cross-cultural pairing since Nureyev danced with Miss Piggy.” –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