By Ada Tseng
Winner of the Golden Bear Award at 2007's Berlin Film Festival, the Mongolia-set comedy Tuya's Marriage is director Wang Quan'an and actress Yu Nan's third feature together.
In a beginning scene of Tuya's Marriage, we see an overwhelmed Tuya step into a tent to take a quiet, hard-earned moment for herself, only to be interrupted by a man yelling, "Tuya! Come quick!" This continues to be a theme throughout the film: Tuya is the resourceful powerhouse, destined to be surrounded by sincere and loving, yet woefully incompetent men.
Although the characters live a rural lifestyle in inner Mongolia -- herding sheep, digging wells, and riding camels as part of their everyday existence -- Tuya's Marriage is a contemporary story that doesn't feel so remote. Director and co-writer Wang Quan'an plays with our ideas of love, marriage, and partnership, providing us with a stubborn protagonist in Tuya, who sees these ideas as three separate entities she can negotiate if one ever fails her. Despite Tuya's commendable attempt to keep her personal matters within a sturdy framework, the film allows the viewer to watch amusedly as circumstances inevitably complicate themselves.
Simplistic plot summaries of the film (which tend to focus on a "reserved Mongolian bride," her disabled husband, her "debilitating back injury," and the multiple suitors this "ailing woman" is choosing between to help her) blasphemously undervalue the fire and headstrong self-sufficiency of the Tuya character. While the title Tuya's Marriage is fitting in more ways than one, the film, at its core, is less about a search for a husband, as much as it is about a woman's dedication to her family and her practical efforts to make the best of a world where long-term survival demands two fully-operating adults.
Tuya, played with captivating grit by actress Yu Nan, and her husband Bater have two young children, and ever since Bater was left paralyzed in a well-digging accident, Tuya has been handling double the load of manual labor to take care of her family. Not only does she have a hundred sheep to care for and miles to trek in order to fetch water and provide food on the table, she also has an adventurous little boy, Zhaya, who tends to aimlessly run off places, as well as a drunken neighbor friend, Sen'ge, whose ambitious plans and good intentions always seem to land him in some sort of wreck that Tuya needs to pull him out of.
Ever since Bater's been restrained to a wheelchair, he has been gently suggesting to his wife that she divorce him, so she can find another husband to help her. It's not that he prefers this scenario, but he can't bear to see Tuya putting so much physical strain on herself. In typical Tuya fashion, she rebuffs his proposition and refuses to separate her family.
Until one day -- and this is where the "ailing woman" reference comes in -- Sen'ge, in the middle of helping Tuya with her transportation duties, somehow flips his truck on the side and gets stuck underneath it. After discovering him in the middle of nowhere, Tuya helps lift the truck in order to get him out from under it, hurting her back in the process. With a lumbar dislocation, Tuya is still perfectly mobile, but she's forced to admit that she can no longer run a one-woman show.
What drives the film is Tuya's admirable, sometimes comical, and often successful insistence on retaining control over her life. Everyone (even Bater's own sister, by this point) is telling Tuya to leave Bater because he's economically impractical. Yet, even when she finally agrees to get the divorce, she still won't budge on her original requirement. Despite flights of proposals and numerous options that suddenly come out of the woodwork when they hear she is single, her first caveat for each suitor is that Bater comes with the package: if they want her, they must take care of her ex-husband as well. Tuya is not searching for a new man, as much as she is searching for a quick fix for her family's practical demands. For the most part, the various suitors are akin to bouts of medication that her body keeps rejecting.
Director and co-writer Wang Quan'an wanted his film to pay homage to the Mongolian shephard way of life, capturing the culture, traditions, and conditions of a place that his own mother grew up in. The film hints that the reason Tuya's job is becoming more difficult and labor-intensive is that government-mandated industrial expansion plans are forcing an already-dwindling rural population to leave their homelands.
Despite the dramatic arc of the storyline, the details are often handled with comedy. Tuya calls her wide-eyed son a traitor for not listening to her, moments before insisting that she'll protect him from wolves by eating them. The accident-prone, boy-at-heart Sen'ge, whose own wife keeps stealing his things, comes up with one ridiculous idea after another (sometimes explosives are involved) to make Tuya's life easier.Tuya's suitors range from an old skeezy classmate from grade school who has recently struck oil, to an awkward, wordless man who keeps showing up with his rambunctious entourage. Notions of loyalty in Tuya's Marriage are strong, but never handled with overwraught emotion or preciousness. And in the end, alcohol is often the solution to many problems.
Tuya's Marriage took home the Golden Bear award at Berlin Film Festival in 2007.
Published: Friday, February 8, 2008
