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.
