FILM: We and Our Mountains review – absurdist Armenian satire thumbs its nose at Soviet Russia

If there was ever an Armenian new wave or maybe an Armenian absurdist wave, then this sprightly and bittersweet 1969 movie – now revived by the Klassiki streaming service as part of a season of Armenian cinema – would be at the vanguard. It was adapted by the Armenian writer Hrant Matevosyan from his own novel and directed by Henrik Malyan. It’s an elegant, elusive parable of a movie about power and the state.

The deadpan coup de cinéma that opens the film is rather brilliant: a frenzied montage of all the exciting things that are happening in the 1960s – pop music, dancing, sports. But all of it is suddenly snuffed out with a hard cut to the silent rural world of the Armenian highlands where four shepherds are living the same tough, unsexy existence as their forefathers: droll, dyspeptic Ishkhan (Frunzik Mkrtchyan), truculent Pavle (Khoren Abrahamyan), melancholy widower Avag (Azat Sherents) and university graduate Zaven (Armen Ayvazyan), whose habit it is to slaughter sheep while invoking the words of Shakespeare’s Othello: “… in Aleppo once, / Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, / I took by th’throat the circumcised dog / And smote him, thus … ” These are lines that resonate among Armenians who presumed to traduce the Soviet state.

Bitterly cold and hungry one night, Ishkhan finds some stray and apparently ownerless sheep and slaughters them to provide a welcome barbecue for him and all his fellow shepherds shivering on the hillside. But then another shepherd, Revaz (Artavazd Peleshian), comes along, asking if anyone has seen his stray sheep. With a mixture of mockery, defiance and embarrassment, Ishkhan and the others tell the furious Revaz they have eaten his sheep and give him an inadequate amount in payment and Revaz furiously storms off.

A shrewd political pastoral … We and Our Mountains. Photograph: Kinoklassika Foundation

The next day, an officious police inspector (Sos Sargsyan) is round at Ravez’s house and is bemused and infuriated at Ravez’s refusal to press charges. This policeman makes it his business to solve the crime and bring the wrongdoers to book: he will not tolerate this primitive world of chaotic hearsay among shepherds and will impose the rational technocratic might of the Soviet state – often grumpily breaking out in Russian as he does so. But he needs clear statements from all four, clear descriptions of the crime, clear confessions or clear witness statements.

However, it is quite impossible. The shepherds are evasive, garrulous and sarcastic and the inspector, like a colonial governor gradually going native, is less and less inclined to press the point. Finally, at a mock trial involving the five men up on the mountains they air their grievances at a Soviet state that takes their labour and their produce – in this case, sheep – and which regards any deviance as a kind of ideological theft.

There is a sly wit and philosophical humour in this film, a kind of Zen satire at the expense of the forces of law and order. The officer is also obsessed with a case in which a man who was accused of stealing his wife’s wedding ring to pay for his boozing was sent to a labour camp: there is no such thing as private marital business where the Soviet state is concerned, and even to insist on such a thing is a serious offence. And finally, those sheep themselves are an ambiguous symbol: do they stand for the conformism that the authorities require? Or are they wild, untameable and unmanageable? This is a shrewd political pastoral.

 We and Our Mountains screens on 10 May at the Cine Lumiere, London, and is on Klassiki from 10 May.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/09/we-and-our-mountains-review-absurdist-armenian-satire-thumbs-its-nose-at-soviet-russia