Between sky and sea The collapse of the Soviet Union and the feverishness of the nineties produced a tornado-like effect on domestic cinema, and there was no stone left on the stone from the film industry of the former Soviet republics. And what kind of cinema could we talk about in Tajikistan during the civil war, poverty and the almost complete lack of opportunities for self-realization for creative people? However, it was then that the star of the director Bakhtiyor Khudoinazarov, Dushanbe and a citizen of the world, rose, and his most famous picture “Moon Dad” was filmed. This film became a breath of fresh water in the desert of film timelessness for the thirsty real, lively and bright art of the audience. The director created his own unique, paradoxical universe with almost lunar landscapes and a quiet blue sea, where reality is intertwined with a fairy tale, revived childhood memories coexist with the shadows of the present, and grief and joy are mixed in a heady frothy cocktail.
Somewhere in Central Asia, in the small town of Farhor, lives a wonderful girl, Mamlakat, innocent even in her thoughts; her heart is open to the whole world and full of young love for life. Mamlakat loves the theater and, of course, when the theater troupe comes to the city on tour, she strives to make it to the performance, but resorts only when the performance is already over. And instead of the spectator's immersion in the vicissitudes of Shakespeare's tragedy, she will have to experience something else, no less exciting. Only the moon lights the girl's way home this late evening, and someone follows her down a narrow path in the thick thickets of bush. In a gentle and subtle voice, he tells Mamlakat that he is an actor from a troupe that gave a performance and is well acquainted with her idols. These words fool the girl, a quiet night envelops her, she suddenly slips into the ravine and falls, falls into it, and someone’s hands shamelessly embrace, bare, caress, and all this is either darkness, or sleep, or miracle. The consequences of this night’s incident are not long in coming, and the whole family, led by a father who wants to save his daughter from imminent shame, goes in search of the culprit in order to unite him with Mamlakat with the sacred bonds of marriage.
The “Moon Dad” draws into its multicolored depth, into the partly Marquesian inevitability of paradoxes. The illusory and decorative diversity of the picture hides its magnetism: a picturesque oriental color in combination with the remains of Soviet life, stunning beauty of the landscapes that Fellini and Tarkovsky looked at for field shootings at one time, and the music of Daler Nazarov, a very subtle, delicate and harmonious component of the atmosphere of the picture. The film is extremely fragile in retelling and analysis, it is the embodied living magic of cinema, making it a true art. The comic here is really funny, and the tragic is often scary, and the transitions from one to another are sometimes so sudden and unexpected that they create a kind of emotional swing in the beholder. The role of Mamlakat is the second big role of Chulpan Khamatova and perhaps the best in her acting biography. It seems that she does not play her, but lives in this image with her whole being; her organics, her plasticity, her charm are the heart of the movie “Moon Dad”.
The painting by Bakhtiyor Khudoinazarov, for all its surrealism, farce and phantasmagoric, is surprisingly lyrical, poetic and at the same time multilayered. And you can engage in its interpretation, interpretation of meanings and embedded messages. For example, the hypocrisy and duplicity of traditional-patriarchal consciousness are exposed on the surface, when a pregnant Mamlakat becomes rejected and all the inhabitants of Farkhor literally throw mud at her. On the other hand, the fate of the main character is not just an allusion to the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, but also her replay, modernization, with one important difference: the son will not be born on this earth, amid sorrow and evil, “closed hearts and oblique glances.” Perhaps because the guardians of morality and morality, without realizing it themselves, nail the hands of saints to the cross with their “spiritual bonds”?
The name “Mamlakat” is translated from Tajik as “country”, and the deepest, most complex and, apparently, personal meaning of the film for the author is the tragic path of his homeland, which lost its large and friendly family, exiled and abandoned to the mercy of fate along with his sons, one of whom was the creator of the picture. No wonder this film was conceived by the director as part of the trilogy “Moon Dad” – “Kosh ba Kosh” – “Living Fish”, where the common leitmotif is forgotten truths, lost in the world and the search for the lost. But the trilogy was not destined to end on this earth, and I would like to think that its final film has already been shot somewhere between the sky and the sea, where Mamlakat flew and where Bakhtiyor Khudoynazarov left so early.