Themes: Social Injustice, Down on Their Luck, Culture Clash
Main Cast: Badema, Bayyartu, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Larisa Kuznetsova, Bao Yungyan
Release Year: 1991
Country: RU/FR
Run Time: 109 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
Veteran Russian writer-director Nikita Mikhalkov's film about the impact of modern civilization on an idyllic part of Mongolia won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film. A farmer (Bayyartu) and his wife, who live in a rural part of Inner Mongolia, have three children. Chinese population control policies prevent them from having any more. The farmer sets out for the nearest town to obtain birth control. He comes upon a Russian truck driver (Vladimir Gostyukhin) who has ended up in a lake. The farmer takes the man back to his farm, and after initially being appalled at the lack of civilization, the Russian becomes enchanted with the peaceful life of the backwards countryside and decides to stay. But his presence presages big changes for the peasants. ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
The Mongolian shepherd Gombo lives in a yurt in Inner Mongolia with his wife, three children, and mother. They are content with their uncomplicated rural lives but Gombo wants to go on having sex with his wife, while she refuses herself in fear of bearing a fourth children, which is against the Chinese law. A Russian truck driver named Sergei is stranded nearby, and finds his way to their house, where he and Gombo become friends despite their language and cultural differences. Gombo and Sergei go into the nearest city together, where Gombo is supposed to buy contraceptives (condoms). Instead he buys a television set and other such goods, then attempts to buy contraceptives, but decides not to when he realizes everyone at the drugstore is a woman. Sergei, a former army bandsman, sings "Hills of Manchuria" in a nightclub, as the band plays from the sheet music tattooed on his back. He is arrested and then bailed out of jail by Gombo.
Gombo returns home, and along the way stops and takes a nap. He has a strange dream featuring his drunken, horse riding relative as Genghis Khan and his wife as Ghenghis Khan's wife. In the dream both he and Sergei are captured and killed. Gombo wakes and arrives home, with the television, and he and his family watch alternately the President of America speaking and a badly sung variety show. Gombo and his wife go into the fields, bringing the Urga (a long stick with a lasso on the end used to capture animals) which is then stuck into the ground far away in the prairie, a signal that a couple is being intimate. A voice over from Gombo's fourth son concludes the film with the image of a chimney belching smoke into the air in the place where Gombo's Urga was once placed.
A Girl and Things (1967) ·And I Go Home (1968) ·A Quiet Day During the End of War (1970) ·At Home Among Strangers (1974) ·A Slave of Love (1976) ·An Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano (1977) ·Five Evenings (1978) ·Oblomov (1980) ·Family Relations (1981) ·Without Witness (1983) ·Dark Eyes (1987) ·Hitch-hiking (1990) ·Close to Eden (1992) ·Remembering Chekhov (1993) ·Anna: 6 - 18 (1993) ·Burnt by the Sun (1994) ·The Barber of Siberia (1998) ·Russians Deprived of Russia (2003) ·12 (2007)
