What a waste of my time!!!

Well Deserved Praise

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Last week I watched Tuya's Marriage and I was pretty interested in the the movie. I thought it would be a nice change from my normal genre taste and a nice way to see the culture of the Mongolians. After watching it though, I have to say it was such a boring movie that I wanted to fall asleep half way through it. I thought it was very boring and the story line was just very plain and not interesting. The names all sounded the same to me and I just felt that the everyday life of these people was just a giant melting pot of stuff. The thing that makes me the most upset is the ending. Tuya still meets with the suitors and makes a deal even though she knows that Shenge wants to marry her, but at the end of the movie you see Shenge and Tuya's ex husband fighting about the marriage and we never got to know who she was even marrying. This left me in a state of confusion and it just made me dislike the movie more and more. I would not recommend this movie but I guess it is a nice way of seeing life in Mongolia.

Overall I did not like this film too much. It reminded a lot of a film we watched in the first semester called Ixcanul, another one I found rather unenteraining. From what I can recall about the first one, both of them were about arranged marriage and both of them had rather little dialogue. They were both pretty quiet films and followed the life of farmers. These films have almost a documentary approach to them. As far as the cinematography goes, they resemble each other a lot in my mind. There were a lot of scenes that were just very zoomed out and captured a lot of the bleak landscape that their countries contained. I can't remember much of the storyline of Ixcanul but this movie similarly followed the life of a female farmer named Tuya. Her husband ha sheen crippled and can't help her support their family. Tuya herself is later injured and is advised to stay away from intense manual labor to avoid further injury. Her husband divorces her and allows her to look for a husband that can surely support everyone in the family. She is caught between two suitors and the movie ends with both of them fighting and her leaving the scene. If I can remember correctly, in Ixcanul, the main character is also injured and later hospitalized. she is stuck with one suitor and is forced to marry him with no choice, whereas Tuya has some freedom in that she can select between two.

An unexpected gem in the middle of the desert, this quiet drama proves itself fully deserving of its Golden Bear at the 2007 Berlin annual film festival.Sixth generation, Mainland Chinese film director Wang Quanan once again bands with actor, and ex-partner of ten years, Nan Yu, to turn his attention to the rural side of life in China- a focal point of his 2004 film The Story of Ermei, which told the story of a young Shaanxi peasant girl. This time 'Tuya's Marriage' takes us into the depths of the vast and arid grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Though its plot is fairly straight forward, and dialogue simple, this quiet and understated film stands strong in its realistic portrayal of rural life, natural acting style, and breath taking landscape. Her husband crippled after digging a well, strong and persevering Tuya must labour, herding sheep and lugging water from a faraway waterhole, to keep her husband and two young children alive. But the young, and still beautiful Tuya can no longer be the sole carrier of her family's burden- she is suffering from lumbar fatigue caused by over exhaustion, and faces possible lower body paralysis. Her husband agrees that she must find a new suitor to marry. This doesn't prove to be so easy though, as Tuya, still faithful to her old husband, is resolute that whoever wishes to marry her must also be prepared to care for him too. Mainland Chinese born actor Nan Yu is well fitted in her role as the independent Tuya. The fact that Nan Yu spent several months living in rural Mongolia prior to filming has given her a great understanding and confidence in the role and comes off as a genuine Inner Mongolian grasslands shepherdess. Tuya's costume potentially could have swallowed many actors whole- she is swathed in numerous, bulky layers of clothing and wrapped tightly in a head scarf- but Nan Yu's expressive face works to bring Tuya to life. Tuya is an independent, incredibly strong woman. She is a shepard to the men around her- her disabled husband Baotoer, her likable but foolish friend Shenge who always falls on bad luck, and even her younger son. She has an incredibly strong loyalty towards her husband "The only way I'd leave him is if I became worse than him" and for his sake turns down many suitors who could have been a way out of poverty for her. But there are a few times when we get to see another side of Tuya's tough exterior. My favourite scene is when we see her, taken away from the farm and work, sitting together with her friend Shenge in his brand new truck. Orange light shines on them from the setting sun, and as they look forward into the distance Shenge speaks of the uncertainties of the future. For a moment we see a fragile young woman, no different from ourselves, who is lost in a big, and changing world.If Nan Yu is the star of the movie, then the landscape would have to be her co-star. Absolutely stunning with it's never ending, barren desert and clear blue skies, the long shots show the vastness of the land and isolation of the characters. The women in the film wear brightly coloured head scarves- pink, red, purple, green- as a way of expressing them selves, and these headscarves are a striking contrast against the often dust coloured backdrop.The use of music in this film is also truly effective. Traditional string instruments are often used, along with woman singing. The music is only used at the saddest times in the film, and is combined with long, enduring shots of the wild and desolate landscape. This creates a haunting feeling of loneliness and forlornness. Both landscape and music become symbolic of Tuya's situation- she is stranded with no solution in sight. Tuya's Marriage generally fits into the drama genre. The film deals with realistic and totally believable characters, and explores how social issues such as poverty and alcoholism bring these characters into conflict with themselves, and the others around them. Poverty makes rural farm life in China tough, and relatively simple tasks such as watering the sheep become difficult because lack of adequate equipment- Tuya must travel 30miles a day just to fetch sufficient water. The question of day to day survival forces characters to make decisions that go against every part of their being-it becomes a cruelly ironic when the only way for Tuya to care for her disabled husband, Baotoer, who she loves, is to divorce him. Several of the characters look to alcohol to numb the pain. An older chain-smoking woman, worn out by life's trials, says "I'm raising six by myself with no man; if I didn't drink I don't know what I'd do." In a sense Tuya's Marriage also becomes a documentary of Mongolian culture and traditional ceremonies, often putting a lot of focus on the landscape, the traditional ceremonies and dress, the music, and traditional foods such as head-to-tail lamb and milk tea. This makes the film a fascinating experience, but my only possible complaint is that this overtakes the films over focus on showing intimate interactions between the characters. Beautiful and affecting, and often scattered with moments of humour and tenderness, Tuya's Wedding gives us a window into a seldom travelled world through the struggles of one young woman.

Wang Quanan's fascinating film "Tuya's Marriage" is a quietly powerful story of female reverence, shot on location against the arresting landscapes of deepest Mongolia, with its immensely graceful protagonist being the prepossessing shepherdess Tuya (Nan Yu), caught between a marital loophole and the tightening grip of subsistence when she's forced to look for a new husband willing to take care of her young children and an invalid ex-husband. Austere and gorgeous, Wang's observations on the encroaching capitalism in a rural land so entrenched in tradition and its collective, scuttles from background to foreground when Tuya explores her options and their economic viability. Wisely eschewing a formal romanticism of the arena, Wang takes us deeper into the all-encompassing humanism of the film, when he chooses a cogitative docu-drama approach to the film, a striking reminder that a film's aesthetics are part of its ethos and message. Triumphing at the 2007 Berlinale with the festival's top prize, Wang delivers a film so complex and rich that it finds its tracts in the human capacity for compassion and sorrow.