I caught this "tragicomedy" from the Russian republic of Tadjikistan on the final weekend of the 1999 Toronto Film Festival, and was surprised at its broad appeal and easy accessibility. The setup is this: a petite girl in her late teens named Mamlakat mysteriously gets seduced and impregnated by someone she hears (but never gets a full look at) on a full moon night when a touring troupe of actors has flown into her small town for a performance of one of Shakespeare's plays. Adding considerable stress to her plight is the fact that her gruff-but-lovable father is widowed and finding it increasingly difficult to support her older brother, a former soldier who suffered permanent brain damage in battle and is now the town idiot.
When the girl reveals her condition to her father, he's determined to find the responsible party, and there's considerable mirth as the family of three tours south central Russia in an attempt to locate the actor by attending plays and having Mamlakat try to identify the voice. The film has a lot of beautiful landscapes (reminiscent of those in THE ENGLISH PATIENT), the production values are excellent, the pacing never drags, there are many laughs, and the three leads are extremely well-cast. (The idiot brother, BTW is played by Moritz Bleibtreu, the dim bulb boyfriend in RUN LOLA RUN. He's excellent -- a bit like Harpo Marx with a limited vocabulary -- but MAN ... he'd better start playing some swifter characters SOON if he wants to avoid typecasting!)
My main cavil: For a film from this exotic a locale, it's just a tad too WESTERN in its sensibilities and techniques. Director Bakhtiyar Khudojnazarov has obviously been a keen student of western popular entertainment. LUNA PAPA is like seeing proven Hollywood crowd-pleasing conventions effectively transplanted to a completely different culture, and I'm not sure that this is necessarily a good thing. There's no questioning that the movie's far more accessible to western audiences as a result, though.
The film didn't have an American distributor at the time of its Toronto screening, but that should definitely change come Oscar time. This is EXACTLY the kind of good-natured, sentimental, non-groundbreaking, non-controversial, Hollywood-reverential movie (think KOLYA) that AMPAS loves to reward in the foreign language category. And there's an added bonus that Hollywood stands to reap for rewarding it: right-wing religious conservatives who are always blaming the entertainment industry for everything will simply LOVE the film's handling of the abortion issue!
When the girl reveals her condition to her father, he's determined to find the responsible party, and there's considerable mirth as the family of three tours south central Russia in an attempt to locate the actor by attending plays and having Mamlakat try to identify the voice. The film has a lot of beautiful landscapes (reminiscent of those in THE ENGLISH PATIENT), the production values are excellent, the pacing never drags, there are many laughs, and the three leads are extremely well-cast. (The idiot brother, BTW is played by Moritz Bleibtreu, the dim bulb boyfriend in RUN LOLA RUN. He's excellent -- a bit like Harpo Marx with a limited vocabulary -- but MAN ... he'd better start playing some swifter characters SOON if he wants to avoid typecasting!)
My main cavil: For a film from this exotic a locale, it's just a tad too WESTERN in its sensibilities and techniques. Director Bakhtiyar Khudojnazarov has obviously been a keen student of western popular entertainment. LUNA PAPA is like seeing proven Hollywood crowd-pleasing conventions effectively transplanted to a completely different culture, and I'm not sure that this is necessarily a good thing. There's no questioning that the movie's far more accessible to western audiences as a result, though.
The film didn't have an American distributor at the time of its Toronto screening, but that should definitely change come Oscar time. This is EXACTLY the kind of good-natured, sentimental, non-groundbreaking, non-controversial, Hollywood-reverential movie (think KOLYA) that AMPAS loves to reward in the foreign language category. And there's an added bonus that Hollywood stands to reap for rewarding it: right-wing religious conservatives who are always blaming the entertainment industry for everything will simply LOVE the film's handling of the abortion issue!