Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Sex
on the Steppes
(Tuya's Marriage, 6/9/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Tuya
(Yu Nan) is a shepherd's wife with few choices in life. Her husband
Bater (Bater) was paralyzed from the waist down in a well-digging accident.
With a spouse and two small children depending on her, Tuya must run
their household and do all the heavy work usually handled by Mongolian
males—including a daily twenty-mile trek to fetch water. Her cares
are beginning to show on her face, which is no longer young. More ominous,
her back is wearing out from all the hard labor. Though she still loves
Bater, she must divorce him and find an able-bodied husband before ends
up a cripple, and her family starves.
In short, the stakes in Quanan Wang's
Tuya's Marriage could not be higher. Rustic but not impoverished,
Tuya's homestead lies on a scrubby, windswept plain bound by nothing
but treeless mountains. Among her neighbors, owning a truck is the pinnacle
of prestige. Given such details, director Wang could have depended on
the purely ethnographic interest of his story. Whether viewers around
the world would be able to connect with Tuya as a character, though—including
her romantic travails—could not have been so easy to count on.
The film (which won the top prize
at the Berlin Film Festival last year) succeeds at the larger challenge.
As a visual stylist, Wang does much with a limited canvas, posing his
figures poignantly but not heroically against a minimal landscape. In
this, he represents the antithesis of the dominant, John Ford-style
of presenting such vistas, where the oppressive emptiness is highlighted
by great, vertical monuments (whether geological or John Wayne). Perhaps
the only quibble to make here is why Wang made such an authentic-seeming
Mongolian drama in Chinese, instead of the Mongolian language.
It appears his leading lady Yu Nan,
who is cosmopolitan enough to be fluent at English and French, could
easily have handled Mongolian. Everything else about her performance
as the luckless Tuya is absolutely convincing. More tenacious than a
tap root, so unglamorous that she seems to merge with the back of her
double-humped camel, her character seems to yield nor expect anything
from the audience. Her beauty is manifested only with time, in those
unguarded moments when her head-scarf briefly falls away. Unfortunately
for Tuya, a good man is as hard to find in inner Mongolia as in midtown
Manhattan.
Speaking
of Manhattan, the women of Sex in the City have real problems.
Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) has reached a crossroads in her relationship
with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Mr. Big (Chris North); Miranda
(Cynthia Nixon) is having trouble in the sack with her hopelessly provincial
(that is, Brooklynite) husband Steve (David Eigenberg), and Samantha
(Kim Cattrall) is totally chaffing under the burden of monogamy
with her dishy, movie-star boyfriend (Jason Lewis). True, Carrie doesn't
have to ride a camel the equivalent of one hundred city blocks to get
drinkable water. That, of course, would ruin her Manolo Blahniks, and
the only vaguely Mongolian clogs should might replace them with would
be Uggs, which Carrie would never be caught dead in anyway.
OK, maybe it's not fair to mock
our favorite HBO gals just because, after watching Tuya's Marriage,
their concerns seem so utterly frivolous. Wealth and privilege are not
guarantees of happiness, only of misery at a higher plateau. I should
add that there wasn't a wet eye in the place for my screening of Wang's
piece of Mongolian neo-realism, but one woman was openly weeping for
poor Carrie at the 1:05 pm matinee for Sex and the City last
Tuesday. Though it is only minorly involving, Sex does come as
a welcome reminder that there a few people left on the big screen who
don't have super-powers.
And who may doubt that Tuya—like
many women from Bolivia to Nigeria to Taiwan—would love to be the
fifth girl in Carrie's posse?
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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