Luna Papa

This is a nice film and I really enjoyed it. And it's different! Have you ever watched a film with a personal narrator who is never seen? Have you ever watched a film that showed you how a bull can mess up a wedding? (I won't tell you...) It is a tragicomedy that takes you to Absurdistan. Well, life can be absurd. Didn't you know that?

This movie reminds strongly of some movies of the director Emir Kusturica. It takes places in an ex-soviet republic in Central Asia. It shows to which extent it became chaotic there after the fall of the soviet union. It is full of contradictories and bizarre happenings. A family is looking for a wandering actor who made its daughter pregnant. During this search many crazy things occur and the end is even crazier. Nevertheless it is very interesting. Sometimes it is very funny and some other times it is sad. It shows also the conditions in which people in this zone of the world are living. It reminds strongly of the movies of Emir Kusturica about Yugoslavia or it's former republics.

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.

Mamlakat lives together with her father, her mentally handicapped brother Nasreddin and her sister. Her mother died when she was born. She´s dreaming of the great wide world. As a traveling group of theatre actors arrives in their little town, she´s spents a night with one of them. Actually she don´t even know his face or his name. One day she notices that she got pregnant and tells her father about it. They decide to find the unknown father of her unborn child. A long journey begins...

This movie will make you laugh and cry! It´s funny, charming but also tragic. Watch it, you will love it !!!

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.