VIDEO: The trailer for Tuya's Marriage
Although it begins and ends with a tragically ambiguous image, Wang Quan’an’s film might be the closest thing that Mongolian cinema will ever get to a romantic comedy. Poor Tuya (Yu Nan) is having a tough time trying to support her family herding sheep on the unforgiving, beautifully photographed plains of Inner Mongolia. Her husband, Bater, has suffered an incapacitating accident while digging a well, and while rescuing her hapless neighbor Sen’ge from an overturned truck, Tuya injures herself also. Now she must divorce Bater and find a new husband who will care not only for her but for Bater and their two children.
The parade of suitors provides an amusing catalogue of Mongolian society; it includes an old classmate who’s made a fortune in the oil business and a rum-dummy baby man backed up by a grinning family elder in shades. But might the solution to her problems be right next door? Although he seems a slave to his money-grubbing wife, Sen’ge’s eyes light up when Tuya is near, and as for his hopelessness, perhaps she protests too much.
Like the 2003 semi-documentary The Story of the Weeping Camel, Tuya’s Marriage draws you into the rich and not-so-alien local color and culture of its setting. But Wang also creates an unforgettable heroine in the mold of Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju (1992). Yu Nan’s beauty is earthier than that of the æthereal Gong Li, and, in this film, deeper as well. Mandarin | 86 minutes | Kendall Square
