The plot of Gottfried Kolditz’s In the
Dust of the Stars could have been plucked straight from episodic
television: a spaceship of six crew members (four of them women, including the
commander) touches down on an unknown planet in response to a distress call,
only for their hosts to claim it was sent by accident; the crew laps up the
local hospitality while preparing to depart, but then discovers that the call
came from the planet’s native inhabitants, now oppressed and forced underground
to mine a rare mineral. Viewed in the present day, the film’s allegorical
aspects benefit hugely from the clear physical resemblance of the oppressors’
leader to Vladimir Putin (although they have less in common behaviorally); that
aside, it’s rather hard to gauge how seriously to take the film. It often lacks
even basic plausibility (for example, the crew members put themselves immediately
in the hands of the planet-dwellers, including ingesting whatever’s offered to
them, without taking even minimal precautions) but the prevailing earnestness
doesn’t suggest (despite various mostly labored comedic touches) a parody or
jape, and the overall thrust of the narrative is fairly politicized. But then it
provides an array of peculiar visual flourishes, including the penchant of the
local women for dancing in skimpily diaphanous outings (the movie seems well-resourced
in some respects, but some of the special effects and other trappings are
distinctly rickety), and the Putin character’s mixing-board-like toy at which
he sits and makes music (again with accompanying dancers always on call) while
his giant pet snake slithers around. The film’s ideological footprint is somewhat
confused, broadly aligning itself with the resistance to the colonial occupiers,
but seeming far more intrigued by the latter; it crafts its villains far more
colourfully than its heroes, with the six cosmonauts having largely
interchangeably non-descript personalities (one of them standing out only by virtue
of an extended shower scene).
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