Monkeys In Winter (Bulgarian: Маймуни през зимата) is a 2006 drama movie.
1961, 1981, 2001. Dona, Lucrecia and Tana are three women, 20 years apart from one another. Dona is a single mother of five in a small village. Lucrecia is a young law student dreaming to escape her depressing reality or shipped off to a backwater. Tana is a wealthy but bored woman who wants to have a child.
Tropes in this movie:
- Citizenship Marriage: As was common in the time Lucrecia's story is set * , this is an example within the country. Her roommates have already entered relationships with well-off men from the capital and are advising her to get pregnant from the son of a wealthy family so she can marry him and stay in the city.
- Everyone Looks Sexier if French: Lucrecia meets a young French microbiologist who's come to Bulgaria to research the spread of spirochaeta during the Crusades. They fall in love.
- False Soulmate: Dona finds work as a street cleaner and falls in love with a coworker. He just disappears one day after he's had his fun with her.
- Gold Digger: Lucrecia's roommates brag about the affairs they're having with wealthy men who can arrange them a stay in the capital.
- Law of Inverse Fertility: Dona has been trying to make a living as a prostitute and thus has more children than she can sustain. Lucrecia gets pregnant just as she is about to elope with her French lover but thinks he has abandoned her and ditches the baby before he returns. Tana has a comfortable life and wants a child but her husband is sterile.
- Mama Bear: Dona when her new husband turns out to be a pedophile who's trying to molest her daughter. She immediately runs to protect her and beats the man to death with a shovel.
- Moral Guardians: The district cop in Dona's village is tasked with finding her a husband to get her to quit prostitution.
- More Expendable Than You: Dona has committed a murder to protect her children and abandons them so that when she gets captured, they can escape and build a new life elsewhere instead of being thrown into an Orphanage of Fear.
- One Degree of Separation: Minor details connect the stories of the three women. Tana visits the same spot in the mountains in order to use its "magical" power to conceive where Lucrecia and her lover went on their happiest day (and where Lucrecia got pregnant). Tana also visits the house Dona moved to at the beginning (now purchased and about to be demolished by Tana's husband) and sees Dona's beloved queen-sized bed getting carried out.
- Promoted to Parent: Dona's eldest daughter when she leaves the kids for their own safety.Dona: You're their mother now.
- Single Mom Stripper/Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Dona is a nice person who just has to get by and thus offers sex to passing truckers for money. She also loves her kids to bits and won't let anything bad happ to them.
