Most people think that this is a film that returns to simplicity, accusing modern civilization of eroding traditional living habits and culture. The end of the film does allude to this.
But is this the main one? Why do we have to find some ideological themes when watching movies, thinking that movies have to be educational? Why not see the story as a story?
What many viewers don't realize is the humor in this film. I was amused more than once or twice while watching. Wouldn't it be nice to have Sergei stabbed a score on his back for the band to play? While he and his wife were in the same room, the son read the revolutionary story aloud outside the closed door, while Gombo's drunk friend rode by, saw what they were doing through the window above the door, and comforted the child with an apple and told him to wait. Son, isn't this very human humor?
In fact, the beginning of the film is very humorous, Sergei, a Russian, drives a car with "Hohhot" written on the door, and there is Peking Opera on the radio, so that he doesn't fall asleep, he falls asleep, wakes up, and changes the channel, Listening to Wagner, I fell asleep again and almost fell into the river, which was also very happy.
After Gombo entered the city, he went to "Zhaojun Hotel" to ask his relatives for help. I saw the name of the store, and I had a lot of coke for a while. However, this may not have been planned by the director Comrade Mikhalkov.
Finally, there's no shortage of humor, especially Gombo's dream, which is so humorous. Some people think that he dreamed of Genghis Khan and his army was the pursuit of tradition, but why did no one notice that Genghis Khan was actually his drunk relative with the little red umbrella he picked up on the grassland, and Genghis Khan's Is his wife his wife? This adds a nice little irony to the dream. Seigei also appeared in the dream, and the two were wrapped in a rug and dragged by a horse like babies, which is actually full of humor. And in the part near the end of the film, his older mother presses the plastic bubble on the TV's packaging, which makes me laugh again, which I used to do when I was a kid.
The film was shot in 1991. Judging from the scene in the film, it looked like the early 1990s, so it was the same era when the film was shown, and at the end, the fourth son of Gombo, who was married, was talking. He is the child Gombo gave to his wife at the end of the film because she didn't buy a condom when she went to town. That is to say, we also look forward to the future, and the future has lost its original beauty, only industry, money, and consumption. This has already laid a foreshadowing in the experience of Gombo entering the city and buying a lot of things that are meaningless to life on the grasslands.
But I don't think the director wants to use the accusation, but to use the contrast between the future and the present (when making the film) to express a kind of sadness about the passage of time and the inevitable loss of life in the past. It is not a criticism of specific groups of people, of that kind of policy, but an expression of a sense of lost sentimentality that is common to modern people.
By the way, the song that Sergei sang is called "Mountains in Manchuria", a waltz that appeared in Russia and Japan in the Manchuria War in 1905. Sergei's grandfather participated in this war. This song has become the theme song that runs through the whole movie, and it has already set the nostalgic and sad main melody of the movie.
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