Dzhamilya

After having watched two movies,both belonging to the the eastern European category,without feeling to comment on either,I tried this one.I honestly got blown away by the movie.It is a romance, but avoids all the clichés this genre has ever created,down to this day.This one has stood the cruel test of time,and will cruise for times to come.The rustic setting,country-life,amazing cinematography,the music and the performances make this movie an unforgettable one.The setting is almost magical with never-end fields of grain,swaying in the wind,and shot in the most poetic way.The rural life,the horses add to the magic the setting creates.The drama,however,in this magical setting is as real as it can be,which is why the movie is seriously timeless.The nostalgia this film evokes is indescribable.However,as already said,nothing in this film is clichéd. It is highly recommenced to anyone looking for an original romance,and specially recommended to any cinephile.

I do remember quite vividly having seen this film in black and white on TV, around 1970 – I was a teenager at the time and never forgot that enigmatic title, "Dzhamilya". As I happened to read Chinghiz Aitmatov's original novel, a few years ago, every single page of it reminded me the stunning visuals of the whole movie. In his foreword to the book, French writer Louis Aragon described "Dzhamilya" as perhaps the most beautiful love story ever told... So there's no real surprise that I probably fell a bit in love, at age 14, of the young leading actress, Natalya Arinbasarova, Andrei Konchalovsky's wife, who had already used her, a couple of years before, in his directorial debut, "The First Teacher" (1966), after a story by the same author and also set in the remote Kirghiz countryside, near the Chinese border – another jewel for the audience who are not afraid of anthropological truth in film and prefer poetic inspiration to action movies. There's definitely something of both Andrei Tarkovsky's and Terrence Malick's visions about these two underrated Russian masterpieces of the late 1960s, i.e. "Dzhamilya" and "The First Teacher" (which I strongly recommend to see as well).