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Seldom has a pastiche been as delightful as this 1967 treasure from Uzbekistan director Elyer Ishmukhamedov. No doubt he was a big fan of the French New Wave because the film draws heavily from sources ranging from Truffaut’s Les Mistons to Rohmer’s La Collectionneusse, with a stop at Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg along the way. Though derivative, it shimmers with a unique and heartbreaking delight in beauty, love and transience and is redolent with the atmosphere of its setting, hauntingly shot in black and white. It’s Tashkent in the summer, when adolescent boys just old enough to be tragically romantic and inconveniently horny float down the river in big inner tubes. One comes aground near a pretty older woman who seems unhappy. They chat, and a bond forms, but it’s just the first link in a chain of love and loss that Tenderness both mourns and celebrates. Limpid, familiar, and exquisitely strange, this is an overlooked classic. In Russian with English subtitles. (83 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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