Tuya's Marriage.

"Like The Story of the Weeping Camel and Mongolian Ping Pong, Tuya's Marriage is partly an anthropological survey of Inner Mongolia's grasslands, though Wang Quan An shuns the allegorical and the fanciful for a more straightforward look at community," writes Ed Gonzalez in the Voice.

"Lest you think that Tuya's Marriage is an ethnographic curiosity, Mr Wang and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (Farewell My Concubine), portray a world that, apart from its hardship, is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Its characters are motivated by the same needs for companionship and material well-being and the same demons - greed, lust, jealousy and despair - that drive everybody."

Updated through 4/7.

"[I]t's the best movie out this week, no matter how few of you are likely to heed my advice and check it out," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Shot by German cinematographer Lutz Reitemeier, it offers a series of haunting images that capture without commentary the slow decay of the nomadic lifestyle and the fragile quality of the Chinese state at its outermost edges."

Earlier: David D'Arcy, from the 2007 edition of the Berlinale, where Tuya's Marriage won the Golden Bear.

Update, 4/7: "The film achieves a great deal of its impact by establishing the tumultuous, withdrawn setting and then subsequently depicting the steadfast, unavoidable encroachment of modernity and its destructive forces into the lives of the already overburdened characters," writes Robert Levin at cinemattraction. "No mere cultural curiosity, the picture also tells a story rife with palpably universal emotions, and it's anchored by what must be deemed an extraordinary lead performance."

Posted by dwhudson at April 5, 2008 9:14 AM