Close to Eden, or Urga, is a film about change. Gombo lives on the border of two lands, China and Russian, and he lives on the border between two times. Close to Eden explores the changing times and one of the most important characters in this exploration is the land itself.
The land becomes a character itself by the way Mikhalkov represents it with his camera. The way his camera wonders away from the action of the film and becomes lost in the hills and grass seems to imply that the land is more important than whatever may be happening to the people that live there. As Ghosh and Sarkar say in their article “The Cinema of Displacement: Towards a Politically Motivated Poetics,” “land is a cultural repository of memories and symbolic of a way of life. The point is made by the camera’s repeated privileging of landscape over action. Often, the camera will focus for several seconds on the plains, and all action is suspended.”
Gombo is a part of this land. He is of Mongolian descent and belongs himself more to the past than the present. He speaks fondly of Genghis Khan and hopes to have another son becomes Khan was a fourth son. His wife, a city girl, tries to persuade him to become a part of modern times. She insists he travel to buy condoms and a television set. When he enters the city, he obviously does not belong to it. He rides through on a horse and looks horribly out of place.
He finally makes the return trip with the television in tow, but he feels guilty about succumbing to the lures of the modern times. Ghosh and Sarkar point out a dream sequence he has on his return trip that illustrates his guilt. “The narrative repeatedly raises questions of home and its loss: in a Chinese nightclub, Sergei sings of the ‘Hills of Manchuria’; Gombo’s wife puts on her ancient Mongolian head-dress and gazes onto a glorious historical past and a disappeared ‘home’; Gombo himself has visions of Genghis Khan’s revenge on him because he is on the brink of forsaking his heritage.”
As they have pointed out, it is not only Gombo that is uncomfortable with the changing times, all of the characters of the film are anxious. All want to remain in the past where their roles and places are familiar. The end represents this past and familiarity. While everything around them has changed, the land has not. The green hills and the swaying grasses are timeless. However, the times are changing and the present enters Gombo’s home even in the midst of the timeless land around it.
Sergei, Gombo’s wife, and their neighbor all bring the modern to Gombo. Sergei is a Russian truck driver and brings another cultural to the land with his truck that cuts across it, leaving its tracks in the grass. Gombo’s wife brings the present in with her insistence that he buy a TV and birth control. Gombo’s neighbor brings souvenirs to Gombo, including an American movie poster. Gombo cannot resist the influx of the modern into his life; it comes from too many angles.
Gombo is a part of his land and of the past. Ghosh and Sarkar describe it as “’Home’ for Gombo is literally a humble shack surrounded by an undulating landscape where he grazes his horses. The open plains, seemingly unmarked by signs of ownership, are sometimes staked out as personal: Gombo plants his urga as a sign of privacy when he makes love to his wife on the grass.” Gombo is a part of the land. The only ownership that is ever claimed is that that they note, when he is making love to wife, an act that is as timeless and natural as the land itself.
The natural act of lovemaking is under attack in the film. Gombo’s wife does not want another child so she urges him to buy condoms. China has put limitations on how many children you may have, and Gombo has already exceeded that number. While he insists he is not a part of China so the law does not apply to him, he cannot ignore the urgings of his wife. His wife finally wins out and he goes to buy the condoms. However, in the end he does not succumb, he does not buy them and tells his wife that they were sold out.
He has however bought the television. He cannot resist all of the changes that are occurring and he cannot completely block out the modern world. As lovemaking has come under attack, by the end of the film so has the land. The final shots of the land that represented the richness of Gombo’s past are of a land that is no longer green and isolated from the world. The hills are covered by the tracks of trucks and a giant smokestack fills overwhelms the horizon. Gombo’s son works at a near by gas station and it seems that despite all of Gombo’s resistance to it, the present has overwhelmed the past.
Posts
