Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.


Awards have plastered this 2002 Russian film for many reasons. Directed and written by Aleksandr Rogozhkin, Kukushka or Cuckoo is a 99-minute delight I do not wish to forget and you will not either, whatever you are in the world. It speaks to all of us who have had a difficult time communicating to someone of a different culture and who speaks an unfamiliar language. It speaks to those pacifists among us tired of fighting an enemy and disillusioned by the chaos of war. Not the least it speaks to people everywhere who believe that enemies can, with patience and friendliness, become friends.

Kukushka is filmed stunningly in the Russian wilderness (Kandalaksa, Murmunsk, Oblast, Russia specifically), but the fable takes place in chilly Lappland in the last months of World War II. while Finland, Russia and Germany are still fighting each other. As the movie opens, a Finnish soldier has been captured by, I think, by the Russians and he can’t make them understand that he’s only in disguise as a German soldier, so they chain him up to a big rock, leave him some provisions and abandon him. For long minutes we watch him cleverly use his provisions to try to escape while nervously eyeing fighter planes bomb a carload of Russians through the long-distance lens of his sniper gun.

Soon he sees a woman dragging the bodies to bury them, but doesn’t see that one, the prisoner, still lives and she drags him back to her nomad’s hut by a shimmering blue lake where she tends reindeer. She nurses him, a disgraced Russian officer, to health just as the escaped Finnish soldier shows up for help getting the chain off his leg. Immediately the middle-aged Russian is hostile to the young Finn, unable to understand that the Finn hates war and loves Dosteyevsky and Hemingway.

The young woman, starved for male companionship after her husband left for the war four years earlier, speaks Saami and no one understands the other, but through primitive gestures they try to communicate. It’s a comedy as they continue to misinterpret what the other is saying and the woman flirts with the Finn even though she thinks he’s ugly (he just smiles).The older man is jealous as well as distrustful of the Finn.

So it’s also a tragedy because the Russian can only distrust the chatty, smiling Finn and it climaxes one day when the Finn tries to tell the Russian that the war has ended, but his wild gestures are seen as aggression.

Everything is done extremely well in Kukushka. Part comedy, part tragedy, part three-way love story, it’s ultimately a charming fable built on the sad reality that different languages can create barriers in communication, but it’s also showing us that this barrier doesn’t have to lead to distrust and tragedy. The Lapp woman plays a crucial role in helping to break down the barriers with her love for both men. Her interesting folk remedies add to the fun of the movie.

The men call the woman Anni like her husband did, but her real name is Kukushka. The Russian calls the Finn a cuckoo because a cuckoo is a condemned sniper and the Finn calls the Russian Gerlost because of misunderstanding him (I don’t understand this unless the Russian knows some English as in ’get lost’). So the film got its name.

Anni-Kristina Juuso, Ville Haapasalo and Viktor Bychkov give impeccable performances as the main characters and were all that you or the director Rogozhkin could ask for. They didn’t hit one false note, but swept me away into their world of fish, reindeer milk, a homebuilt Finnish sauna, clear blue skies and rocky terrain. Kukushka is rated PG-13 in the U.S. for a little male nudity and the implication of sex (her loud moans are hilarious). There is some blood, but the movie only has the one war scene and one later scene with dead pilots. The focus is on how the three characters have been affected by the war and how they’re going to get past it.

I highly recommended this wonderful, eerily-scored movie and am sure you will too…and not just once. Cuckoo has a lot to say to us (subtitles help too) and once is not enough to hear it all.


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD