‘Close to Eden’

Nikita Mikhalkov’s poignant 1992 film is felicitously titled, for it opens with a seemingly endless vista of a grassy plain in China’s Inner Mongolia, in the middle of which is a small encampment, home to a happy, healthy young peasant couple (Bayaertu, left, and Badema) and their family. What Mikhalkov has done so effectively is to catch us up in the daily existence of such thoroughly likable people that not until the film’s stunning coda do we realize that he has been bidding fond farewell to a way of life that’s soon to vanish (Cinemax Wednesday at 8 p.m.)