ASHIK KERIB Movie Review

The Lovelorn Minstrel
The Hoary Legends of the Caucasus

In a weirdly mythical age that seems to exist only in the stunningly fertile imagination of the director, a musician who has fallen in love with a rich man's daughter is punished by being made to spend his years wandering the countryside. The visions and adventures that he encounters are what interests the director, Sergei Parajanov, whose 1964 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors remains one of the great visionary masterpieces of the 1960s. Ashik Karib has a narrative, all right, but it takes a bit of digging to sort it out. Parajanov's storytelling is subordinated to poetic evocation—an attempt to use the medium of film to animate impossible and magnificent dreams, the kind of thing that becomes literalized and flattened in the hands of lesser directors. Featuring a soundtrack as shockingly beautiful as its images, Ashik Karib can clearly be seen as a major influence on recent films such as Iran's Gabbeh, in which surrealistic tableaux transport us to a world of the subconscious, far beyond that which is merely mystical or symbolic. Not a film that will likely be optioned for a remake by Touchstone, Ashik Karib is a complete original, as rewarding as it is demanding.

NEXT STOP … The Color of Pomegranates, Mother and Son, Gabbeh

1988 75m/C RU Yiur Mgoyan, Veronkia Metonidze, Levan Natroshvili, Sofiko Chiaureli; D: Dodo Abashidze, Sergei Paradjanov; W: Giya Badridze; M: Djavashir Kuliev. VHS KIV, FCT