Luna Papa (1999)
The unborn child of Mamlakat is telling her story. She is 17, beautiful and vivacious, and dreaming secretly of becoming an actress. She lives with her father and brother in a small village in Central Asia. One night she is seduced by an actor from a travelling troupe, who poses as a friend of Tom Cruise, and makes her pregnant. She tries to abort, but her father and brother become determined to find the seducer, setting in motion a cascade of comic adventures.
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a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.
If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.
This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
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.
It's such a great movie, the direction is perfect, the landscapes are beautiful, and the actors are really good. You can laugh a lot, but you don't lose a sense of reality (well, sometimes it's a little exaggerate). If you like Kusturica you can't miss it.
"Luna Papa" is a nice and also funny film but some scenes seem quite strange. Sometimes, me and my friends just looked at each other, a big "?" in the face. Some scenes are comparable to what the French call "absurd theater" but the end (about from the moment when the cow fell down) is not "absurd" but stupid.