Ulzhan: an unlikely treasure-hunt

Ulzhan (Ayanat Ksenbai) and Charles (Philippe Torreton) in Ulzhan

Much as I have problems with it as a vehicle for imperialist self-definition and propaganda, there’s still something oddly compelling to me about orientalist art, when it is done in a self-aware way. Even after taking Said’s critique into account, Frederic Arthur Bridgman paintings can have a certain charm when their seeming-romanticism and even kitsch gives way to a hidden complexity, an exploration of the ways in which ‘West’ and ‘Rest’ are more alike or on the same wavelength than not. The 2007 French-German-Kazakh film Ulzhan seems to fall into this category.

To be sure, Charles (portrayed by Philippe Torreton), Ulzhan (Ayanat Ksenbai) and Shakuni (David Bennant) start out essentially as Western-movie stock characters – and the argument that they don’t particularly progress or grow seems to be a valid one: Charles, the mysterious stranger with a troubled past; Ulzhan, the supportive and selfless prairie schoolteacher who falls for him; Shakuni, the oddly-dressed vagabond who may be more than he appears. And at times one feels like the film tries to touch on too many themes, tries to be too many things at once. Yet despite borrowing from Westerns (and Osterns), neo-noir, road films and magical realism – its complex and often-frustrating story as it moves from a gritty realism of oil rigs, private security firms, dive bars and Soviet apartment blocks into an otherworldly shamanic venture into the realm of death. This broad arc, coupled with the vast backdrops of the Kazakhstani steppes, in the end create a mesmerising and oddly-compelling film.

In a certain sense, the character of Shakuni himself – a mercurial half-Kazakh, half-diaspora Soviet German fluent in French who embraces an eclectic mélange of Indian, Chinese and shamanic religious thought and acts as something of a medium for Charles and Ulzhan – is something of a writer/director avatar in the sense that the film tries to do something similar to what he does. One can argue that the film is tasked with relating certain shamanistic insights into questions of life and death and purpose through a ‘Western’ story structure and medium. But Shakuni himself seems to be a rather incomplete and not-quite-credible character, however entertaining; and the same could be said of the film itself.

Warning: spoilers to follow.

At the border of Kazakhstan, a frumpy Rich Hall dead ringer with a similar heavily-jowled middle-aged charm (but without the deadpan-snarky wit) appears in a car and presents his papers: Charles, a Frenchman. After driving off, he abandons his car, takes out his effects and starts hitchhiking over the steppe, though he refuses rides from everyone he meets. He goes off-road and finds himself in a town with a dimly-lit cowboy-themed nightclub. He drinks vodka, goes to a party in an apartment, and has awkward drunk bathroom sex with Olga, a Russian bar bunny from the club. He wakes up half-naked and hung over with all of his papers stolen, but the one thing he seems to care about – a canister with a map, a scrap of paper in a foreign script, a crumpled photo of a woman with two children and a postcard – he eventually finds, to his relief.

Charles continues walking, but gets chased and arrested by several Kazakhstani rent-a-cops near an oil rig; when he can’t present his papers to their supervisor he is accused of working for Halliburton or Gazprom, and spends the night in a makeshift trailer-prison. His identity is eventually confirmed by the French consulate in Astana, where he is sent via helicopter to pick up his new papers. Charles spends some time marvelling at this glittering, Las Vegas-type construction in the middle of the desert, with no towns or villages around. The French consul takes him to a lingerie / fashion show, but a visibly-uncomfortable Charles picks up and leaves after a few minutes, then keeps walking – no papers in hand. In an old abandoned building he has his first surreal, unlikely meeting at night with an odd-looking character, Shakuni, who seems to speak perfect French.

Passing through a town Charles sees a small herd of horses and asks whom they belong to. He is pointed to the school, where his odd appearance and fluent French make him an instant hit among the schoolchildren – though Charles answers their questions, one of the children in particular seems to make him sad and wistful. Their schoolteacher, Ulzhan, comes out and takes him back to her place for dinner, and we learn a little more about Charles’s backstory and his destination: Khan-Tengri, a tall mountain which is held sacred by the old shamans. Ulzhan’s mother tells him that is where they go to die. Charles buys a dapple-grey from Ulzhan, and sets out again on his journey – only to find that Ulzhan has been tailing him. He tries several times to send her back, but she keeps returning to him: in one instance even bringing back his horse and saving him from a sandstorm. Along their journey they visit an abandoned kolkhoz, as well as a nomadic village (where they witness Shakuni perform a yurt-blessing), an abandoned holy site with Buddhas carved into the steppe rocks, and a lone painter doing landscapes replete with mushroom clouds, at a radioactive nuclear weapons testing site. Charles tells Ulzhan that he has with him a fragment to a map, that shows the location of a buried treasure, left by the Chinese Nestorians on Khan-Tengri after the Tang Dynasty.

It becomes clear at several points, but particularly at the nuclear test site, that Charles has something of a death-wish. He goes charging with his horse onto the site. He also gets into a fight with two knife-wielding hoodlums over a dead Kazakh’s briefcase containing old letters from World War II – which he confides to Shakuni that he enjoyed. Ulzhan, fed up with Charles’s daredevil antics, correctly guesses that his coming this far, and his going to Khan-Tengri, has more to do with his dead wife and children than it does with his buried treasure – but she continues to stay with him despite suspecting he has come this far just to die. Shakuni stays behind with the dead Kazakh and his widow, and Charles and Ulzhan make their way up Khan-Tengri alone.

Near the top, Charles throws the saddle-bags off of his horse, abandons it and goes off on foot. Ulzhan takes the horses back down the mountain, but not before she silently hugs him. Charles, near the peak, takes out the postcard and the picture of his dead wife and children and lays them under a rock. He turns back to see Ulzhan tying up his horse and leaving it for him before disappearing from sight – offering him the choice to stay and die, or follow her and live. But in the last shot of the film we only see him sitting down on the mountain and weeping.

End spoilers.

Again, I have to wonder if the character of Shakuni isn’t supposed to represent in some larger sense the project of the movie overall: the overly-expressive half-German, half-Kazakh vagrant-hustler with his embrace of ‘dharma’ and shamanic lore. The characters are guided liminally out of a ‘realist’ situation and into the realm of the symbolic, where the dead and the living seem to talk to one another and even the difference between them is not all that clear. Indeed, it’s not all that clear that the ‘night life’ Charles experiences on his arrival in Kazakhstan (or the lingerie show in Astana, for that matter) is in fact ‘life’; and the figures of Charles’s dead family accompany him all the time, right to the very end of the film on the slopes of Khan-Tengri. The conversation Ulzhan and Charles have in the kolkhoz seems to underscore this point: if the life under the Soviets was a ‘zoo’ and life under capitalism a ‘jungle’, how are human beings supposed to live?

As with the other Kazakh films I have been watching recently, the scenery seems to take centre stage. But rather than being a broad expanse suitable to dreaming of the stars (as in Baikonur) or a climate both literally and metaphorically hostile to human life and comfort (Kelin), here it seems to underscore the peculiarly-Gallic preoccupation with a lack of meaning and direction and the difficulty of choosing life over various forms of apathy, despair and death. Again, though, the problems of this being ultimately a piece of orientalist art (in Said’s sense) come to the fore. Asian landscapes and Asian characters form a backdrop for telling a quintessentially-European story. Still, the fact that they seem to have gotten the gist and purposes of the elder shamanic tradition mostly right, with Charles’s personal tragœdy forming the basis for the entire quest, shows that the writer and director seem to be taking their thematic material seriously.

Again, I feel like this is a case of a 100-minute movie trying to do too much and be too much: as a latter-day Ostern with possible shamanic undertones, it almost works. But our protagonist Charles spends most of the film as a sullen, unlikeable grump, and he only starts to become an interesting character when the film is two-thirds over. We never learn that much more about Ulzhan than when she is introduced to us. And Shakuni – even though his backstory is fascinating and plausible – almost feels like a sketch or a caricature more than an actual character. I think I get what the filmmakers were aiming for with their cultural commentary, but the jury’s still out – at least for me – on whether they managed to succeed, or whether the thing collapses into a pretentious mess. I feel like I would have to go back and watch it again from the beginning, to decide if I would even want to recommend it.