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MovieMail's Review
In a more benign universe than our own, the great Armenian-born director Sergo Paradjanov would have celebrated his 84th birthday this year, having spent the four preceding decades turning out a stream of masterpieces that built on and even surpassed the unparalleled imagination that he first displayed in Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). Sadly, in reality Paradjanov died in 1990, having spent much of the 1970s in prison (on the curiously Paradjanovian charge of "homosexuality and illegal traffic in religious icons", almost certainly rigged by the Soviet authorities), and was only able to make two more features.
Building on the tableau vivant style that he first unveiled in Pomegranates, Legend of the Suram Fortress (1984) and Ashik Kerib (1988) filter Georgian and Azerbaijani folktales through Paradjanov's unique sensibility. The Suram Fortress is vital for Georgia's defences, but keeps crumbling under its own weight, and the only certain remedy involves a human sacrifice by a willing victim. Ashik Kerib is an archetypal wandering minstrel, exiled by his lover's father and forced to roam the wilder parts of Azerbaijan in search of redemption.
But these bald descriptions don't remotely do justice to Paradjanov's treatments, or to a level of invention that comprehensively trumps clearly minuscule budgets. Each film offers images that are breathtaking in their simplicity: a warrior lies on his funeral bier, his chest still rising and falling as his reputation lives on, fresh pomegranates turn black at the news of a death, exotic palaces are conveyed by decorative rugs spread out in a field. The music is often more eloquent than the minimal spoken content (Paradjanov was a world-music pioneer long before it became fashionable), and the credits are in a script that seems impossibly exotic to Western eyes. But not to Paradjanov's: his great project was to preserve and build on centuries of creative activity by the inhabitants of his native Caucasus, and if he'd been born anywhere but the Soviet Union (which imposed its own sanitised simulacrum of 'folk culture' on its ethnic minorities) he'd have been declared a national treasure.
Sergei Paradjanov and Mikhail Lermontov documentaries
The Minstrel's Song featurette
Mikhail Lermontov biography
Cast and crew filmographies
Image gallery
Film Description
A wandering minstrel falls in love with a rich merchant's daughter, but is spurned by her father and forced to roam the world for a thousand and one nights - but not before he gets the daughter to promise not to marry until his return.
Parajanov dedicated his final completed film to his close friend Andrei Tarkovsky and to all the children of the world.
