‘Nabat’

Nation: Azerbaijan

Screening time: 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Regal Cinemas; 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Palm Canyon. 105 minutes

Director: Elchin Musaoglu

Cast: Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, Vidadi Aliyev, Sabir Mamadov, Farhad Israfilov

Storyline: An elderly peasant woman cares for her dying husband on a remote farm outside of a war-torn village shortly after the turn of the century while grieving for a son who has gone missing in action. The battle with Armenia over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh slowly but surely forces the evacuation of everyone in the village, but the peasant woman doggedly continues searching for her son, which has become her only reality as her husband dies and the world around her disintegrates.

Scorecard: 7 out of 10. The sophistication of the storytelling is in such contrast with the primitive conditions of the settings that it takes a while to realize that the drudgery exemplified by the peasant woman’s dreary routine is merely a device the storyteller uses to take viewers to his destination. Motamed-Arya, a significant Iranian actress, so loses herself in her endless walks from house to house that we don’t realize at first that turning on the oil lamps of each deserted home she visits in her search for some clue to the whereabouts of her son is actually an act that saves her village from destruction. When the enemy sees all the lights on in so many village homes, they think the town wasn’t evacuated as planned, and they have no desire to massacre the civilians.

Bruce Fessier