Jasulan (Jasulan Asaýov) in Kardiogramma
Recently having finished Dárejan Ómirbaev’s 1995 Kardiogramma (or Cardiogram, or Heartbeat), let me say this about it first. It’s a breathtaking and shameless act of self-plagiarism. It’s also remarkably well-done. One may think of it, in essence, as a remake of Kaırat. A remake, that is, with a younger protagonist, colour photography, a more straightforward narrative structure (complete with an actual conclusion), and a more conservative use of the filmic ‘syntax’ and symbolism. One irony I noticed: Kaırat has a Kazakh title and uses exclusively Russian dialogue; while Kardiogramma is a Russian title which uses a mixture of both Kazakh and Russian dialogue.
Warning: spoilers below.
Kardiogramma follows Jasulan (Jasulan Asaýov), a pre-teen from rural Kazakhstan whom his father complains wastes fuel in order to watch TV. Jasulan has a heart defect, however, stemming from a childhood case of tonsillitis that caused complications, though a resident doctor tells his mother that perhaps it’s because she spoils him too much. He is admitted to a sanitarium in Almaty for treatment, and is promptly singled out for cruel bullying by some of the other kids – partially because he (supposedly) doesn’t speak Russian. Having been raised in the countryside, he ostensibly only speaks Kazakh, but there are hints that he knows more Russian than he lets on. His only friend at the sanitarium is a roommate in the same dorm who also speaks Kazakh. Much of the plot revolves around Jasulan developing a painful first crush on his nurse, Gula (Gul’nara Dusmatova), an older woman who bandages his leg after he injures it playing soccer. When Jasulan showers, he catches a glimpse of Gula naked in the women’s shower stall through a crack in the wall, and starts to fantasise about her. Nurse Gula, however, is in a relationship with the resident doctor – something which Jasulan discovers by sneaking around the sanitarium.
Jasulan also learns to stand up to the bullies and their pranks. One of the older kids knocks one of Jasulan’s dorm-mates – a frail somnambulant youngster who enjoys reading – off a piece of playground equipment into the snow. Jasulan – outraged on his behalf – challenges him to a fight in the sanitarium basement, which he promptly loses. The end of the film sees Jasulan stowing away in the back of a supply van: running away from the sanitarium and ostensibly taking charge of his own fate.
End spoilers.
Kardiogramma, let’s kindly say borrows, a great deal of its plot and thematic material straight from Kaırat. Jasulan’s alienation, symbolised directly by his heart defect, is the parallel of Kaırat’s; both of the protagonists transition from the countryside into a more ‘urban’ setting, though in Jasulan’s case that transition is more explicit. Both Jasulan and Kaırat suffer from a case of awkward, hopelessly unrequited first love. In both films, screens play an important rôle in the background, whether movie screens or television screens. The scene with Gula and the doctor in her apartment is exactly parallel to a scene in Kaırat with Indira and the train’s chef in her bunk – except it doesn’t feature a broken train-car window; instead Jasulan falls two stories from where he had been eavesdropping on the edge of Gula’s balcony. And dreams, or at least the permeable liminal boundary between waking life and dreaming, features prominently here, too – both in Jasulan’s own case (he tends to dream about his mother and the Kazakh countryside, just as Kaırat did) and in the case of his somnambulant bookish roommate. In at least one instance, the dream sequences are directly and painfully related to Jasulan’s experience of being bullied by the older boys in the sanitarium.
I had the feeling as I was watching Kardiogramma that I was watching something of a more mature, more purposeful retelling of Kaırat, which is not a bad thing. The biggest difference between Kaırat and Kardiogramma, however, is the ending. In the end of Kardiogramma, Jasulan makes at least two distinct choices which instantly render him a more relatable and sympathetic character: the choice to fight, and the choice to run away. I felt I could sympathise with Jasulan a great deal better than with Kaırat – those two choices he makes, and his acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of them, make him much less of a passive cipher within the film. Kardiogramma therefore has the distinctive marks of a bildungsroman, as Jasulan makes a credible, if painful and sacrificial in several ways, transition into adulthood.
Other, more subtle differences. Ómirbaev himself seems to have matured in the four-year space between these films. Kardiogramma is much less on-the-nose and much less melodramatic with its use of symbolism and magic-realist flourishes. The symbols in the film are not just put ‘out there’ like the TV in Kaırat’s dorm: they serve a purpose and a function even within the context of the film’s story. Even though Ómirbaev’s preoccupations – with first loves, with dreams, with the existential pains of adolescence – seem unchanged from Kaırat, he makes them much more visceral by attaching them to characters that he takes the effort to invest the audience in. The dreams experienced by Jasulan and his roommates are clearly demarcated, and they are meant to show us something relatable about their inner lives. The spoken-word poetry that peppers the film here and gives us audible glimpses into Jasulan’s inner world has a clear tie to the film’s world: it’s being recited aloud, whether by Nurse Gula or by the somnambulant roommate.
At this point, perhaps I’m just betraying some of my own preferences as a viewer. I’m not a big ‘art-house’ film guy; not the world’s greatest devotee of Robert Bresson’s school of praxis. I like the fact that here Ómirbaev is showing us some of his own personality as a director. His characters speak both Kazakh and Russian. He isn’t artificially relying on pregnant silences and portentious cinematography. The transition to colour photography clearly suited him well. The establishing shots at the beginning of the film alone seem to presage the Kazakhstani film industry’s completely-understandable fascination with its own backyard landscapes – something which is downplayed or even wholly missing in earlier ‘New Wave’ films like Mest’, Igla or even Otyrardyń kúıreýi.
I don’t want to intimate, by the way, that Kaırat is without value – no, not at all! In fact, I think the French distributors of these two films were wise to put them side-by-side on the same DVD. Between Kaırat and Kardiogramma, we get to see the evolution of a filmmaker’s vision, as he creatively adapts some foreign filmic ‘big concepts’ to two different versions of the story he clearly wants to tell us.
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