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To me, this movie is perfection.

Awesome Movie

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

In my opinion, I do not believe that Tuya's Marriage is close to the movie I would recommend to everyone. The reason being is that it is slow paced, and does not truly go with any genre that I have dealt with in movies. But, this is why I am so intrigued by it, even though it is slow, it touched on important topics in world geography and people's lives and how they are affected when fate is unkind. I believe that this movie, even though it is not one I would recommend to everyone, is something that truly shows hardships and problems that happen in Inner Mongolia (which is situated in China). This movie does not really fall into a specific genre outside of extreme drama, but it is hard to realize this unless you take time after watching it to ponder the plot and the points made inside it. I think this is a movie more for someone looking to widen their eyes to problems in the world, and that want to understand how it can be in a certain place if tragedy strikes.

The film Tuya's Marriage is not a happy one. The movie begins and ends with the same scene of her eventual wedding day, with her youngest son fighting with another boy who sneers at him for having two fathers. Tuya's marriage portrays a world that, apart from its hardship, is thoroughly recognizable. Its characters are motivated by the same needs for companionship and material well-being. And the same wants of greed, lust, jealousy and despair — that drive most people. Tuya, after breaking up the fight, retreats from the celebration to reflect. Tuya (protagonist) is physically disabled and married to and in love with a disabled peasant Ba'toer. Tuya (Yu Nan) is financially forced to divorce him and find a new husband to support herself, her 'ex' husband and their two children. She is called upon by suitors from near and far when word spreads of her decision to remarry. The film observes the fascinating rites of courtship and the unsentimental deal making by Tuya, who knows what she wants and what she has to do to get it. After a series of men refuse to look after Ba'toer, Tuya finds herself torn between a Baolier, a divorced childhood schoolmate of Tuya who is newly wealthy, having struck oil or a friend who promises to marry her once he finds and divorces his wife. Baolier's money and lust may represents the forces of technological change that is consuming the region. In Baolier's marriage proposal he agrees to take care of Bater by putting him in a nursing home, and Tuya agrees. However, it's not a good enough deal for Bater. Soon after arriving at his new him, he starts, feeling abandoned then pitifully gets drunk and slashes his wrists. The ending, like I said is not a happy one. Nonetheless, I'd recommend it to another friend or teacher.

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.

Unlike the two faux documentaries which people now associate with Mongolian films, TUYA'S MARRIAGE is a well-acted, intricate and layered story about a strong young woman trying to hold her life together. Very like Gong Li in THE STORY OF QIU JU, Yu Nan plays Tuya, a stubborn and beautiful woman faced with an impossible predicament who must find her way through an onslaught of well-meaning (mostly) but ineffectual men to keep her family together. Tuya's affection for and loyalties to her disabled husband Bater are put to the test when she is forced to find a new husband in order to survive. All along the "obvious" choice, Shenge, her foolish but adorable neighbor, keeps trying to be the hero but falling on his face. Tuya must keep saving the men in her life from near disaster: Bater, Shenge (twice), and even her young son. The film becomes the romance/triangle of one woman and two men - much like JULES AND JIM or even FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (co-written by Wei Lu, who also co-wrote TUYA'S MARRIAGE). At the end of the film, her marriage includes both men, but immediately we see that she must continue saving them from themselves - and keeping everything and everybody together.