Dzhamilya

I do remember quite vividly having seen this film in black and white on TV, around 1970 – I was a teenager at the time and never forgot that enigmatic title, "Dzhamilya". As I happened to read Chinghiz Aitmatov's original novel, a few years ago, every single page of it reminded me the stunning visuals of the whole movie. In his foreword to the book, French writer Louis Aragon described "Dzhamilya" as perhaps the most beautiful love story ever told... So there's no real surprise that I probably fell a bit in love, at age 14, of the young leading actress, Natalya Arinbasarova, Andrei Konchalovsky's wife, who had already used her, a couple of years before, in his directorial debut, "The First Teacher" (1966), after a story by the same author and also set in the remote Kirghiz countryside, near the Chinese border – another jewel for the audience who are not afraid of anthropological truth in film and prefer poetic inspiration to action movies. There's definitely something of both Andrei Tarkovsky's and Terrence Malick's visions about these two underrated Russian masterpieces of the late 1960s, i.e. "Dzhamilya" and "The First Teacher" (which I strongly recommend to see as well).