Directed by Georgiy Daneliya • Drama • With Stanislav Lyubshin, Levan Gabriadze • 1986 • 133 minutes
Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa Solaris directing Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and you'll come close to the existential weirdness of this loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy. Two average Muscovites - a plainspoken construction foreman and a Georgian violin student - encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, 'Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura?' In a flash, they're teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin-Dza-Dza galaxy - a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously noncommunicative. A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, and Jodorowsky's never-made Dune, the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction.
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