The Valley of Wonderful Tears The film begins with the blue, in which the older main characters, herdman Tanabai and his horse Gulsara, as if drowning. It is the blue of the Tien Shan Mountains or dusk, but the blue of darkness, the layer between life and the unknown. The beautifully staged voice of Yuri Solomin behind the scenes returns the viewer to reality. So begins the story of a man and a horse, told once by Chingiz Aitmatov. A story of human labor, injustice, lost friendship, unhappy marriage, and forbidden love. The story of the age-old bond between man and horse, which originated from the time of the legendary Manas, and even earlier: in the epic of the Kyrgyz, the purpose of a newborn foal to its owner is emphasized. A story that turned from a story about ordinary life under the crescendo regime into a weeping for the fate of all living things, doomed to an endless series of losses. A ruthlessly realistic description, combined with disruptive lyrics, is both a difficulty and a temptation for the director, a difficulty that appeals to a sense of proportion. But Sergei Pavlovich Urusevsky had no measure. A student of Tavorsky, a genius of the camera, he was primarily an artist. He embodied the plans of others divinely, but he drowned his directorial work in excess; on it - the label of failure. And, I think, in vain – the film should not be compared with either a book or with the works of those who studied at the director’s courses. The film should be watched as a film operator, admiring the findings. The word "picture" applies to the film literally.
The night is blue, and it is a purified color and heights, and sorrows, blue loneliness. The day is red, it is the world of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, its sun and banners. Post-war time. Kolkhoz. Forge, her fire. The kolkhoz scenes, like Shmarinov’s illustrations, are bulgingly realistic. Babies and girls in bright clothes, like poppies on dry ground, flowers, pebbled by the wind. Mizan scenes with girls in elegant clothes, with the “people” in general, seem frankly staged, almost operatic, and the main characters sometimes look simply “colored”. But all the decorativeness goes where the living feeling begins, where the inexorable attraction plays. Beautiful love of two horses, tenderness of animals running on the golden splashes. "Spring" footage from Gulsara is silent. Here the horse speaks, that is, it is silent as it should be. No music, no voiceover, only the enchanted camera moves, admiring the greenish bursts of the stream, the movements of graceful animals, and the only soundtrack here is the singing of birds. Night glow of water, beloved with a graceful neck and velvet croup that “came – and left like a dream”. In the same way, secretly, by the wind that inclines one spike to another, Tanabaya induces a woman coming to reap, so carelessly, so forbidden. She also shudders, tries to escape, but can not, and now the two are bathing in light dissolved in water, in glare, playing on the greens. Water deceives lovers: the stream it pours on the horse, floods the approaches of people to each other, brings the mystery of betrayal to the outside, drowns a person in the pour of his grief. Rainbow shimmerings of tension - looking through tears and pain, desire and birth; love shines with pearl overflows, but its color turns off, turns black after a flash of orange, unreal torture of a mutilated animal.
The writer, and with him the director, comparing the existence of two living beings, push to the background, or even completely ruthlessly clean the storylines of the story, leaving only one chosen key: love. And, more importantly, the feeling of male power, fertilizing and bringing full joy, which fills with meaning the life of man and beast. That which makes both animals have life and give life. Castration of the horse abruptly breaks off his line, as if after this fact until his death nothing was, did not make sense: thrown to the ground, he literally and figuratively experiences the revolution of the world upside down. But the line of a man who is morally mutilated with loss and shame is also broken. Tanabay is a stranger, a different, rare creature, like his horse Gulsary, his yellow buttercup - this suit is considered sacred in Kyrgyzstan. The heat of the forge seemed to undress Tanabai; his share put on him the clothes of a fighter, and then a herdman, forced him to climb the mountains, walk in the herd of the collective farm. It was the same with the horse: the heat of the sun allowed him to wear nothing but a skin, but his share tamed him free of all but instincts, running. Both were made to win, and both were torn, and both lost all their way through the valley of tears. And yet both remained special, and both were beloved.
Kazakhs Nurmukhan Zhanturin and Farida Sharipova fit perfectly into the Kyrgyz story. Deep, passionate, Tanabai in the brilliance of glory, and in humiliation, and in old man's infirmity looks like a lump. Thin is the doomed tenderness of Byubuzhan, torn between a widow's duty and an inexorable craving for a beloved. A successful choice of actors is another plus of the film: the film could win as an actor if it went the way of serial narrative. The film could win and how - modern word - clip, as a series of lively illustrations. The artist’s greed played a cruel joke: Aitmatov’s artistic language is such that the picture of living life, translated by a major writer into a word, is practically not subject to reverse translation into visual, the invisible word is stronger than the depicting picture. The director, on the other hand, seems to be trying to reproduce exactly the invisible that the word denotes, but is not exhausted. The film is pure self-expression without limits, without balancing. With this approach, it simply could not turn out to be either cash or approved by colleagues and critics. But he deserves to get into a collection of brilliant failures. For, wittingly or unwittingly, he conveyed the most important thing in the story: the bond between man and animal is not so much in the mutual need and kinship of instincts, as in its equal mortality.