Hey folks, Harry here. While this is a review that has appeared on the site before... before... It was buried, and given it's screening at SUNDANCE and the fact that the film is STILL without a domestic distributor... I decided to once again call attention to this film, which sounds fantastic, that will be playing at Sundance in the upcoming weeks. Art Snob saw the film up in TORONTO... where many other films vying for attention were pushed, while this gem was... overlooked. Don't overlook it again.
LUNA PAPA
reviewed by Art Snob
A film with surprisingly-broad appeal filmed in the Russian republic of Tadjikistan (try finding THAT on a map!) named LUNA PAPA. It's a "tragicomedy" about a girl in her late teens named Mamlakat who 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. An unwanted pregnancy is the last thing she needs ... her 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 discovers that she's pregnant and reveals it to her father, he's determined to find the responsible party, and there is much 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 really excellent but boy ... he'd better start playing brainier 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 it's far more accessible to western audiences as a result, though.
The film doesn't have an American distributor yet, but that may very well change come Oscar time. This is EXACTLY the kind of good-natured, 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: the religious right-wing conservatives who are always condemning the entertainment industry will simply LOVE the film's handling of the abortion issue!
