TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Chris_Middlebrow The best definition I can give to movies I greatly admire is that they take me someplace I don't expect to go.It can be a special location. It can be a special moment. It can be a special revelation.Close to Eden, as this movie has been titled in the United States, offers the entire combination. A 1992 Russian nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the movie opens on the vast grassy expanses of the steppes of Mongolia, where the setting initially is evocative of a certain timelessness. The historical instant cannot be ascertained confidently, even within an error margin of a few centuries. Nor do we know what the movie designs ultimately to tell us.Such uncertainty begins to give way as a vehicle and visitor enter the scene and are involved in a mishap that results from first sleepiness and then fright. The nature of the vehicle and visitor narrow the reference era to an accuracy level of mere decades. From there, the plot leads to a likable nuclear family of herders, to which a grandmother is attached. We follow their story and soon learn when, among the vast expanses of time, it occurs.The theme here is subtly...ecological...in three parts. The first part concerns the lifestyle of the family, and its self-sufficiency. The second part concerns the travel the father undertakes, and the reason for the travel, an assigned errand he seeks to accomplish in the course of that journey. The third part concerns the conclusion, where the issue of time again intervenes. There is in fact no timelessness, but rather its passage. The narrator in A River Runs Through It is "haunted by waters." Similarly, the ending of Close to Eden is haunted by grasses. Its status as one of the great foreign films arrives in the last few knockout minutes.

albertine simonet This is a film of so many pleasures - the delineation of a culture not usually represented in the mainstream; an empathetic, comic-sad, character-driven narrative; an awe-inspiring, Lean-like evocation of the vast lonely Mongolian landscape and its dwarfing of its inhabitants; its moments of genuine hilarity and sadness - that you are fully prepared to forgive its glaring flaws - its 'Westernising' an Oriental subject matter (lush composition, mobile camerawork and editing, excessive close-ups, epic music), unoriginal city/country dichotomy (although this is more complex than at first appears) and its maddening fudge into apocalyptic fantasy.

allyjack The film's closing stretch provides one of the most memorable depictions of creeping dysfunction as the family sits in front of the TV, watching either Bush-Gorbachev, or else not much of anything, with their Stallone "Cobra" poster propped up behind the TV. That aside, the movie's theme of lost innocence and cultural decay is perhaps a bit overdone (although not as overdone as the English title imposed on the movie would suggest) - indeed, there's almost nothing else to the film except somewhat ponderous - if inherently spectacular - shots of landscape and documentary-style observation, offset by the boisterous intrusion of the lost Russian (who in his drunken escapades brings it as close to a knockabout comedy as conceivable) and strange, strenuous fantasy sequences that drive home the notion of futile ambition, but are too contrived for comfort. Despite all reservations though, the movie often transcends mere exoticism - their early morning discussion about condoms for example is touching and convincing. as well as faintly surreal (from a Western perspective). The film suggests that traditionalism and modernity CAN actually coexist, which makes their failure to do so all the more poignant; the only way to make sense of the closing voice over is to conclude that it comes from the future, underlining the picture's sense of dislocation.

peter-209 One of the best films I know: beautiful, pensive, playful, realistic, poetic, humane, up-lifting. In the barrage of trash, one of the few films that makes me believe in humanity. I love this film so much that I arranged home projections for my friends several times. With all the up beat that I am mentioning, it is very open and truthful. Where in an American movie could you see an on-screen slaughter of a real lamb? And it was not ugly or gory at all! On the contrary, it was very decent and sensitive, teaching us respect for Nature.And another little point. Has anybody noticed the inconspicuous little voice-over at the end which essentially makes "Urga" science fiction?!