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 ... There is a sly wit and philosophical humour in this film, a kind of Zen satire at the expense of the forces of law and order. The [police] officer is also obsessed with a case in which a man who was accused of stealing his wife's wedding ring to pay for his boozing was sent to a labour camp: there is no such thing as private marital business where the Soviet state is concerned, and even to insist on such a thing is a serious offence. And finally, those sheep themselves are an ambiguous symbol: do they stand for the conformism that the authorities require? Or are they wild, untameable and unmanageable? This is a shrewd political pastoral.