The Yellow Bride

Billed as the first independent Azerbaijan production, this film begins with a table of statistics illustrating Azerbaijan's fate at the hands of the Armenians and others, not least in the Karabach War of 1988, when it lost 30,000 nationals and suffered economic devastation. Perhaps the body counts were required for home consumption, because writer/director Rzayev's war drama is basically a humanistic entreaty about the dark, destructive, yet often farcical nature of war. It pairs an incompetent Azerbaijani hero in the Chaplin or Benigni mould with a sympathetic Armenian soldier who have deserted from their respective armies. The desertions prompt opposing armies to join forces in tracking them down, proving that, to the military, pacifism is less acceptable than nationalism. This is Renoir territory, of course, but the film plays it as satire, much in the up and down manner of recent Balkan war dramas. The soundtrack, repetitiously featuring the Azer's deep gasps, is very annoying.