Tagline: Love always finds a way.
Set in the remote inner Mongolian grassland, “Tuya’s Marriage” is the moving tale of Tuya (Nan Yu,) the iron-willed wife of Bater, a herdsman who has been paralyzed. Tuya takes up the sole responsibility to make a living for her family, but her hard labor highly endangers her health.
Faced with a harsh reality, the couple decides to divorce so that Tuya can seek a better life. Imposing her own conditions – her new husband will have to take care of Bater, their children and their herding land – the strong-minded, stubborn, but gentle Tuya embarks on an arduous and at times unintentionally comic search for a new husband in this Mongolian design for living.
She meets suitors who are rich but disingenuous, likable but shy, and keeps her family together against insurmountable odds. Wrenching and beautiful, “Tuya’s Marriage” is the indelible portrait of a strong woman determined to save her family, herself and their ancient way of life.
Review
Wang Quanan’s fascinating film “Tuya’s Marriage” is a quietly powerful story of female reverence, shot on location against the arresting landscapes of deepest Mongolia, with its immensely graceful protagonist being the prepossessing shepherdess Tuya (Nan Yu), caught between a marital loophole and the tightening grip of subsistence when she’s forced to look for a new husband willing to take care of her young children and an invalid ex-husband.
Austere and gorgeous, Wang’s observations on the encroaching capitalism in a rural land so entrenched in tradition and its collective, scuttles from background to foreground when Tuya explores her options and their economic viability. Wisely eschewing a formal romanticism of the arena, Wang takes us deeper into the all-encompassing humanism of the film, when he chooses a cogitative docu-drama approach to the film, a striking reminder that a film’s aesthetics are part of its ethos and message. Triumphing at the 2007 Berlinale with the festival’s top prize, Wang delivers a film so complex and rich that it finds its tracts in the human capacity for compassion and sorrow.
Production notes provided by Music Box Films.
Tuya’s Marriage
Starring: Yu Nan, Bater, Sen’ge, Zhaya, Ting Ting Nen
Directed by: Quanan Wang
Screenplay by: Quanan Wang, Wei Lu
Release Date: April 4th, 2008
MPAA Rating: None.
Studio: Music Box Film
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $78.016 (3.2%)
Foreign: $2,388,325 (96.8%)
Total: $2,466,341 (Worldwide)