Rikhsivoy Muhammadjanov

The film follows the lives of four upper-class teenage boys in Tashkent, Uzbekistan including the shy son of a famous film director, a chubby cut-up, son of a rich and successful businessman, and a tough aspiring playwright who works after school to avoid his raging alcoholic of a father. The four all live in the same housing complex and go to the same high school, where they fall for a beautiful, tough-as-nails new female student. Within the exotic locale of Uzbekistan, the boys experience the usual "growing pains" as they fall in love, "borrow" the family car, work hard to earn extra money and have too much to drink. A funny, touching slice-of-life comedy-drama.

Considering that Musakov’s Abdulladzhan (1991) was dedicated to Steven Spielberg, we might suggest that these four boys embody nothing more complicated than a conflict of youthful innocence with some ominous threat—the basic workings of E.T. (1982) or War of the Worlds (2005), say. That threat, however, is best understood not through vague nationalism or warmed-over socialism, but through the other reference-point of Abdulladzhan—Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1980). Musakov leaves his boys in a simplified radiance so bright and so overexposed that it no longer looks like the skies of sunny Tashkent, but a disturbing, borderless luminosity to match the flat tonal range of Stalker’s “Zone.” Our Uzbek boys are nowhere in particular; this is a broader domain than anything international.

Our four dear friends are about to graduate from school and start a big life. Khurshid is studying at a medical university, Hamdam is returning from the army, Jawahir is trying to earn money by pawning on the street, and Bakhtiyar is working under his father. They all still love Lola.

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