I may recommend this movie for those who has a great enjoy of life. The music in the movie is the music of life. The movie itself shows the truth in the life, the truth which is difficult to correct or let me say, to change. Th life in the deserts like Farkhor is very difficult. I myself spend my life in such conditions. For those who never experienced this life maybe the movie is a bit funny. But for me, I didn't notice any comedy, but rather tragedy. Yes, the tragedy of the usual lie of Tajiks. The movie is in Tajik/Russian language. However it is written that the movie is in Russian only. Daler Nazarov is great in choosing composition. Long live Bakhtiyar Khudaynazarov!!!

The film is a pre-Enlightenment allegory, or the description of one thing under the guise of another. Certainly not social utopianism or realism. The young woman tempts the mortal laws by defying custom and the material world. She wants to follow her spirit and a craving for Shakespeare and the world of Orpheus. She is compelled to bring forth the child . . . or the longing of her soul. She suffers various hardships and adventures on her journey, sometimes comically and ineptly aided by her hapless buffoon father and idiot-savant brother. Only when she leaves the earth can the mysterious birth occur in the coupling of the female with the male.

I'm not sure I liked the ending, which was a bit on the surrealistic side even for this movie, but otherwise I was engaged by the humour of this movie. There aren't too many movies that surprise me repeatedly. I was afraid to leave my seat, as I figured the movie could go in any direction.This isn't Hollywood. Instead, this was movie with peculiar, amusing and imaginative twists and turns, not to mention the odd sight gag.I saw "A time for drunken horses" about a week before this. "Horses" was about Kurds and set in Iran on the border with Iraq, while "Luna" was set in breakaway republics of the old Soviet Union. There are lots of similarities between the movies: deep poverty, dealing with ignorant, unkind small town people, running a gauntlet of soldiers to do commerce, and so on, yet "Luna" is a great comedy and "Horses" very much a bleak drama. What you take away from both movies is that life is still very difficult and provincial in some parts of the world. Geographically, too, the films are set in locations that are not very far apart (at least from the perspective of a North American!). Woman are treated in a crappy "old world" way in both places, too.Moritz Bleibtreau as Nesreddin, the brother, is brilliant. Perhaps he is the reincarnation of Harpo Marx.If you're sick of Hollywood formula films and you want to have a good time, I'd recommend this one.

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!