Anaǵa aparar jol: Sataev and Spielberg schmaltz

Ilyas Ersenbaev (Ádil Ahmetov) in Anaǵa aparar jol

If there was one aspect of the film Réketır that I didn’t particularly like, it was the title sequence. The story of Saıan’s descent into crime simply didn’t need all the sepia-soaked baby pics and school graduation shots and establishing montage of his youth growing up in the late Soviet Union. It also simply didn’t need the dramatic autobiographical narration with Saıan ponderously wondering about where it all went wrong in his life. Likewise, the propagandistic pæan to Nursultan Nazarbaev’s autocracy and how it established and preserved the great Kazakh nation at the end of Jaýjúrek myń bala was over-the-top and unnecessary, and came close to cheapening rather than glorifying the victorious self-sacrifice of the hero Sartaı. The dastanic format itself should have carried all the patriotic weight it needed to. If there’s one thing that an independent art-film director like Dárejan Ómirbaev or Ardak Ámirqulov could teach a big-shot state-funded blockbuster director like Aqan Sataev, it’s the value of restraint: the idea that in some cases, less can actually be more.

Unfortunately, with 2016’s Anaǵa aparar jol [Eng. The Road to Mother], we do not get restraint. Or such silly notions as subtlety. In fact, reviewing this film, I take back most of my – in retrospect, fairly trifling – criticisms of Ámirqulov’s Qosh bol, Gúlsary!. By comparison with this film, Gúlsary was the very model of literary and cinematic œconomy. I can easily forgive that film for the venial sins of being a trifle overdrawn, and of having production values on par with a made-for-TV Masterpiece adaptation of classic literature. At least Ámirqulov is aware enough of the value of cinematic language to be able to show us what he’s talking about with the emasculation of Homo sovieticus under an uncaring bureaucracy. And Ámirqulov nowhere feels the need to beat us over the head with his point.

The story itself is touching and heartfelt. It’s the tale of a boy, Ilyas Ersenbaev (Ádil Ahmetov), born on the steppe into a nomadic family, who has to survive the ravages of the Civil War, forced sedentarisation, famines and political purges which took such a heavy toll on all the Kazakh people. His goal in life is to return to his mother Maryam (Altynaı Nógerbek), from whom he was separated at a young age, and his childhood friend Úmit (Arujan Jazılbekova). The road to mother is not an easy one for him; he has to navigate the Soviet orphanage system, military academy and the Eastern Front of the Great Patriotic War, and finally the gulag. And because of the political sensitivity of his family background – he had both Red and White kinsmen growing up – he and his mother are both forced to take on different surnames, which makes locating each other more difficult, even though neither one of them gives up.

This is a simple, eloquent and moving story which should be able to carry its own weight. I say should be, because in the cases where the actors are able to shine out from underneath Sataev’s ham-fisted and clumsy direction, there are actually glimmers of it doing so. All of the leads have been clearly well-cast, and the genuine human moments of interaction that happen between them are all sweet and poignant. In a single fleeting moment at a train station we can easily believe that the long-separated Ilyas and Úmit have fallen for each other. The problem is that neither Sataev, nor screenwriter Timur Jaqsylyqov, actually trust the actors – nay, even the main characters – to convey the story to us. At the very moments which should be left to carry their own emotional weight, instead we have a narrator Morgan Freemaning over us in theatrically-guttural Kazakh: ‘At this moment, Ilyas felt the pangs of loneliness upon his heart,’ or ‘Ilyas did not let his losses embitter him, for he was filled with hope and love’. This gets in the way of the storytelling rather than pushing it forward.

Sataev also doesn’t seem to trust the audience to draw elementary queues from the cinematic language he gives us. To give one example: in one scene early in the film, a ten-year-old Ilyas points out to Úmit a dandelion that’s sprouted up between the cracks of the stones in a well, and admires its tenacity. Later, an adult Ilyas in solitary confinement in the gulag uses the handle of his spoon to scratch a detailed drawing of a dandelion in the wall of his cell. Sataev could have left it there and made his point perfectly well – that is what Ómirbaev would have done. But he has to actually replay that scene in flashback from the beginning of the film. You know, just in case we forgot.

There are other places where Anaǵa aparar jol sort of asks its audience to suspend its critical faculties. Early on in the film, a gang of White bandits, including Ilyas’s uncle, arrive in Ilyas’s village, steal the cattle and horses, shoot his father and then kidnap him from his mother. Then we are later expected, as per the musical flourishes, dialogue and framing, to feel sorry for Ilyas’s kidnappers and see them as paragons of virtue. I can’t help but think of this entire sequence as a missed opportunity, and also one that works against Sataev’s didactic purposes. How much more powerful would this sequence have been if the writers had elected – instead of essentially telling us which brother to root for – to explore in greater depth how the Revolution frayed the traditional bonds that bound families and brothers together! Indeed, this becomes a theme later, with the village Party chief and his son Joldas falling out with each other, and the son turning into something of a monster.

The dastanic notes of this film are again somewhat noteworthy, albeit appropriately modernised from a film like Jaýjúrek myń bala. Ilyas’s birth in a snowstorm, his early childhood struggles, his kidnapping, his righteous defence of the weak even in the orphanage, his heroism in war – actually all point to a frame of reference in the figure of the dastanic batyr. There is also the foil to the batyr in Joldas. Ilyas is a nomad: both literally and figuratively – he is generous, hospitable, pious, honest and upright. The apparatchik Joldas, however, is a traitor-Kazakh who has forgotten his nomadic roots. Having been spoilt by his father, he becomes an unfaithful husband and an abusive drunk who uses threats and bribes to get what he wants.

It is also the prayerful, traditional Hanafî Islâmic faith of both mother and son that is seen to save them. This is also a common theme in Sataev’s movies, and it shows up repeatedly here. Ilyas is shown to be a good Muslim as well as a patriotic Kazakh: giving alms, praying to God, fasting – even starving in the gulag. The pilgrimage he makes, though, is not to Mecca, though he does make it as far as Constantinople. The true pilgrimage he makes is reflected in the title of the film itself.

Anaǵa aparar jol could easily have ended ten minutes before it actually did. A satisfactory concluding sequence is then followed up with an utterly needless and frivolous coda wherein the narrator is revealed to be Ilyas’s son, a teacher who is telling his family’s story to a classroom of Kazakh high school students. In a light blue painted classroom in front of a classroom-sized political map of an independent Kazakhstan and a big old portrait of Nursultan Nazarbaev, of course. The film then pans away from the classroom to the building exterior with the Kazakhstani flag waving in front of the Alatau, just in case you missed all the patriotic symbolism in the title sequence! I’ll say it outright: this punchline comes very close to ruining the damn film. It’s one thing to make an indictment of Stalinism for its brutality and lack of all right human feeling – and that’s one of the things that Anaǵa aparar jol does remarkably well – and elevate a drama of human survival in its place. But Sataev just can’t stop himself from slathering on the sort of cheap nationalism you’d expect from, say, Wolf Warrior 2.

This is a real shame, because sandwiched between the clumsy narration and the soppy score there is a real portrait of fundamental decency and quiet human endurance, on the part of Ilyas and his separated family. This is framed against, and in despite of, the dehumanising brutalisations – physical, psychological, even sexual – of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The most touching points in the movie are when Ilyas is allowed, onscreen, to stand up for a friend of his in the orphanage, to give food to some beggars who have lost their homes in the German advance, to help a fellow gulag prisoner to his feet during a forced march despite rifle-whippings and bites from the guard dogs. There is a stirring drama of the human spirit in here somewhere, and that’s a testament to the sort of storytelling Sataev could have done. But what we get instead with Anaǵa aparar jol is a turgid, tedious, schmaltzy, syrupy mess. A significant part of the problem, I think, is that even though Sataev wants desperately to make real Kazakh film, he can’t help but look to the West, to Hollywood, for inspiration – and ultimately for approval and validation. The stylistic trappings of the movie don’t so much whisper ‘aspiring Spielberg’ as shout it from the rooftop of the zavod. All that having been said, there’s still enough good in here – good acting and good history both – to make it worth seeing once.