Baran: a working-class romance with Biblical themes

I had the pleasure of watching Majid Majidi’s film Children of Heaven some years ago, and I liked it so much that I decided to go back and watch some of the other notches on his directorial belt. I managed to pick up a used DVD copy of Baran at Half Price Books some months back, and finished watching it yesterday. Watching this movie turned out to be a thoroughly serendipitous choice, as it helped me to illustrate a portion of the Bible study group at St Herman’s Orthodox Church, for which I was the discussant. I was discussing the early life of the righteous patriarch Isaac, the son of Abraham.

Baran is a romantic melodrama, but it is much more than that. It is deeply specific: it involves an Iranian construction worker who falls in love with a crossdressing Afghan refugee who is trying to earn money to support her injured father. But for all of that specificity, it carries all the weight of a fable—a tale with universal importance and appeal. And, Majidi being a religious director, there is also a spiritual significance to the film, and the references and appeals to Scripture were probably not at all unintended.

Lateef (a name which means ‘gentle’ in both Arabic and Farsi) is a young Iranian who works on a construction site. Actually, he has it fairly easy. He’s the tea boy, and his job is to boil tea and carry it on a platter to the other workers on the site. His boss, Memet, in order to get his construction work done faster and cheaper, hires on the down-low Afghan migrants and refugees from the Taliban, who do back-breaking manual labour for cents on the dollar (dinars on the touman?) compared to their Iranian coworkers. One of these, a man named Najaf, falls and breaks his foot; he has to be trucked home. But this incident attracts the attention of government inspectors who question Memet about his illegal hiring of Afghans.

Najaf’s replacement, brought by his brother Soslan, is a young boy named Rahmat (whose name means ‘mercy’ or ‘graciousness’)… who is actually a girl in disguise. After Rahmat has an accident herself and spills half a bag of cement on a fellow-worker from two stories up, Memet assigns the Afghan ‘boy’ to do Lateef’s job—and Lateef to do real construction work.

Lateef, who is money-grubbing, lazy, hotheaded and more than a bit arrogant, holds a grudge against Rahmat and tries to undermine ‘him’ and play pranks on ‘him’ at every turn: including dumping dirty water over ‘his’ head from three stories up, and trashing the kitchen where ‘he’ works. But as Lateef is plotting yet another scheme against ‘him’, he discovers—as the wind wafts away the curtain from the kitchen area and Rahmat is doing up ‘his’ hair—that ‘he’ is actually a she.

Lateef’s attitude toward Rahmat changes, and he begins to observe her more closely. He discovers that she is in fact not an opportunist or greedy at all, and in fact lives up to her name. She does her best to give good tea and bread and cigarettes to the workers, and she takes the scraps and goes up to the third floor of the construction site to feed the doves with them. Lateef observes all of this in secret, and begins to help Rahmat both secretly and in the open. The story is really one about Lateef repenting, about his character changing. He gradually goes from being a grudging, arrogant, pugnacious lout—to also living up to his name.

There is a lot in the story of Lateef that is Jacobean… that is to say, that reflects the story of Jacob as he labours for Laban to win the hand of Rachel. Lateef’s labours for Memet and his acts of kindness toward Soslan and Najaf—and his disappointments when these go astray or unnoticed also reflect this story (as when Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his elder daughter Leah). But there is one scene in particular which reminded me more strongly of Isaac and Rebekah.

There is a scene close to the end of the film, where Lateef is helping Rahmat (whose actual name is Baran, or ‘Rain’) pick up some vegetables that she spilled on the ground. The two of them make eye contact. Their expressions change. It is clear—despite Rahmat-Baran’s character not saying a single word throughout the entire film—that Baran returns Lateef’s feelings for her. But then she puts on her niqâb in front of him. All the time, she does not break eye contact with him, even while the truck which is taking her back to Afghanistan is driving away. But Lateef smiles as he watches one of her footprints being washed away by the rain.

This scene seems to be a direct reference to the passage in Genesis where Rebekah is approaching Abraham’s camp from afar, and notices Isaac at a distance. She questions Abraham’s servant about who he is, and upon learning that this is her intended husband, she leaps down from her camel and veils herself before him, presenting himself to her as a bride. The emotional poignancy of this scene is enriched by this parallel to the Hebrew Scriptures.

Again, this is such a sweet, beautiful, wholesome, heartfelt film that its appeal becomes broadly universal despite the deeply Central-Asian particularity of its setting and characters, and the barriers of language and class and sexual mores that divide the two protagonists from each other. The cinematography is also amazing… Majidi has the ability to create a film that has a certain weight, using natural lighting and long static shots in order to mimic the same effect that American movies had from twenty years before (but have since lost). I highly, highly recommend Baran as a film with both deeply human and deeply spiritual significance.

The Legendarium according to Smaug

A meteoric dumpster fire

I’ve watched the first two episodes of Rings of Power. Even though I promised I wouldn’t.

It’s bad. And I mean really, holistically bad.

Let’s get the trivial concerns out of the way first. Casting Black actors and actresses to play hobbits, dwarves, men and elves isn’t at all a problem for me. If anything, Tolkien’s dwarves are supposed to be swarthy-skinned and dark of complexion, which for some reason they weren’t in the Jackson movies; and the hobbits were envisioned as being just as diverse of physical appearance as humans. The question is whether the actors and actresses can act well. (Sir Lenny Henry and Sophia Nomvete can and do act well here. Ismael Cruz Córdova? Not so much.) Also if it isn’t done cynically, which is a bit more questionable. Race politics have nothing to do with why I think Rings of Power is a full-on betrayal of Tolkien’s work.

What does, then? One word: Galadriel.

In Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Galadriel was originally a stubborn, headstrong and adventurous girl—this much is true. She did have something of a growth arc. The reason she came to Middle Earth at the end of the First Age was because she was intrigued by the place. She was tempted, in part, by Fëanor’s promises of glory, and longed to see the shores of an unknown land and even to rule them as queen. But she refused to join Fëanor’s quest for revenge against Melkor for the death of his father (Galadriel’s grandfather) Finwë, and she (along with her father Finarfin and her eldest brother Finrod) refused to engage in the political quarrels of the Noldor which ended in the slaughter of the Kinslaying and the Burning of the Ships.

That is as much as to say: she was stubborn and adventurous, but neither brooding nor vengeful—she was of like mind with her father and brother, not having sworn Fëanor’s oath of revenge. Further, it is highly hinted by Jack himself that the reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she loved it. She loved the people, she loved the living creatures, and she especially loved the forests. The reason she stayed in Middle Earth was because she found hope there.

Melian said: ‘There is some woe that lies upon you and your kin. That I can see in you, but all else is hidden from me; for by no vision or thought can I perceive anything that passed or passes in the West: a shadow lies over all the land of Aman, and reaches far out over the sea. Why will you not tell me more?’

‘For that woe is past,’ said Galadriel; ‘and I would take what joy is here left, untroubled by memory. And maybe there is woe enough yet to come, though still hope may seem bright.’

In Rings of Power, there is no love at all in the character upon whom they wrongly bestow the name of ‘Galadriel’. There is no joy. There is not even a trace of hope. Her reasons for staying in Middle Earth have nothing to do with any kind of attachment to Middle Earth, land or creatures or people—and everything to do with hunting down her brother’s killer, Sauron. The makers of Rings of Power have made this ‘Galadriel’ into precisely a bitter, brooding, violent woman who is dead-set on revenge: in short, they have made her into Fëanor Mark II.

These are not the same character. Not even at different ages.

This is partly ideological. There is a current in the corporate culture machine’s interpretation of feminism, that thinks that in order to pander to women viewers they should make all female characters ‘strong’ by putting weapons in their hands—by making them ‘action heroines and corporate girl-bosses’. But this isn’t good writing, and arguably it isn’t even good feminism. Let me be blunt: Éowyn wasn’t a badass just because she picked up a sword, delivered a one-liner and stabbed a wraith in the ‘face’. If it had been just that, she wouldn’t have gotten any of the cheers she did. Éowyn was a badass because of the context of that action: she cared about Merry and her father enough to protect them.

This ‘Galadriel’? She doesn’t care for anything or anyone except her dead brother—and not even Finrod himself, but his ‘task’. This ‘Galadriel’ would never have been found worthy of the option of returning to Valinor in the first place—the pardon that the Valar bestowed only upon Finarfin and his children, among all of the Noldor. The only reason Galadriel was allowed to return to the Elf-home was because she wasn’t as vengeance-obsessed as Fëanor, and hadn’t taken Fëanor’s oath! Rewriting ‘Galadriel’ as another Fëanor doesn’t strengthen her—it diminishes her in ways that are frankly blasphemous.

And what’s worse, Rings of Power tries to make her Fëanorish vindictiveness a sign of her sagacity. Like Cassandra she warns of Sauron’s known-to-the-audience return when everyone around her, High King Gil-Galad and ‘Elrond’ particularly, disbelieve her and tell her she’s overreacting (the mansplaining chauvinist bastards). Never mind that in the book, Galadriel was the one urging Gil-Galad to show caution, not the other way around—and she was right to do so!

I’ve got other grievances with Rings of Power that operate on a similar level. The portrayal of ‘Elrond’ as Gil-Galad’s political staffer and speechwriter is particularly offensive. As is the notion that Celebrimbor would be worried about the size of the elves’ ‘workforce’ in building his Super-Duper Mega-Forge—sending ‘Elrond’ off to literally hammer out (and I do mean with a literal hammer) a labour contract with Durin’s dwarves. Tolkien would be appalled at this! His elves and dwarves had their flaws, but they were not industrialists and capitalists. Their crafts, were crafts. Capitalism was personified in Lord of the Rings by Saruman, and assembly-line Fordist industrialism metonymised by Isengard. They were certainly not valorised the way they are here.

But this should not come as a surprise. Both my gripes against ‘Galadriel’ and the characterisation of the elves and dwarves generally stem from a much broader complaint. That is: Rings of Power is nothing more and nothing less than the Legendarium according to Smaug. It’s Tolkien’s universe as interpreted by Jeff Bezos—born on third base, mega-polluter, war hawk defence contractor, exploiter of the poor—someone who doesn’t even value Tolkien or his œuvre and has nothing to do with Tolkien’s own ecological-minded Christian Tory-anarchist mythopoesis. Of course any interpretation he sponsors in order to garner a greater market share for his streaming service, is going to run dead against the logic of Tolkien’s universe.

Tolkien often expressed his own view through the words of Faramir. And this was Faramir’s view: ‘I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.’ Rings of Power, so far, takes the opposite view: trying to dazzle with special effects, battle sequences, blood and fire—while holding the substance of their source material, the characters and the setting, in utter contempt.

Give this one a hard pass.

Feriengewitter: a review

Dani (Étienne Charle) and Lucie (Sandra Puhlmann) in Feriengewitter

East German cinema is something of a new field for me, but if films like Eine Liebe in Deutschland and Feriengewitter are representative, it’s one I’m happy to continue exploring. The East German film Feriengewitter (Holiday Storm), directed by Karola Hattop, is a fun little made-for-TV family movie that’s two parts The Parent Trap and one part National Lampoon’s Vacation, with an 80s Europop soundtrack and a bit of seasoning from To Kill a Mockingbird. This sounds like a combination that shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Feriengewitter somehow manages its disparate slapstick / screwball comedic elements, its family-drama secrets and its urban-rural tensions with a deft hand and a subtle sensitivity.

Basically, the film starts with a Berlin family in crisis. Peter and Rosi, a middle-aged couple, bicker with each other whenever their son Dani isn’t in the room. They’re tired of each other and want to get a divorce, but Peter doesn’t want to spring the news on Dani at the start of the summer holiday. Instead, they’ll wait it out until after their holiday is over before signing the papers. On a suggestion from Dani, they decide to visit the far southeast—the Elbe Sandstone Mountains on the border with Czechoslovakia—for a road trip over their holiday. However, while in the village, Dani meets a cheeky, precocious, cigarette-smoking, gum-chewing tomboy named Lucie, who immediately strikes his interest. In his attempts to impress and befriend Lucie, he ends up accidentally discovering his parents’ plan to divorce. And then there’s the weird old forester who lives alone out in the woods outside the village, who also supposedly keeps a mummy of his dead wife in the attic…

Feriengewitter at first looks like it’s going to be something of a bildungsroman for Dani: a boy going out into the world, meeting his first crush, going on adventures in the countryside, eventually asserting his agency and deciding where and how he will live in the face of his parents’ divorce. And to be truthful: there is a lot of that bildungsroman in here. In between taking stupid dares bull-baiting, trespassing in the old forester’s house and downing half a bottle of honey schnapps (with the inevitable consequences the next morning), Dani does develop as a character, attempts to find his own place in the world, attempts to take responsibility for himself and the people he cares about. Lucie, despite her reputation as the ‘horror of the agricultural commune’, ends up advising him and encouraging him throughout, and also asserting her own preferences; this is, in a more limited way, a growth-story for her as well.

But ultimately, it’s the parents who are faced with the decision to grow up. Dani and Lucie are the ones who seem to hold the most functional moral compasses in the film. Peter and Rosi, on the other hand, find themselves at pains to justify their decision to split—not just to Dani, but even to each other and to themselves. We get hints that both of them are half-heartedly trying to start affairs behind each other’s backs, even though neither of them really likes their new flings as much as they like each other. And even their arguments and attempts to hide the truth from Dani have a ring of falsity to them. Thankfully, the film does end up allowing Peter and Rosi to sit down and talk to each other rather than at each other—even though it’s an understated scene, it’s nonetheless quite emotionally impactful.

The film’s pretty clearly a low-rent production. The limited-range cinematography, lighting effects, the sound quality (some of the dialogue is close to inaudible), the Vermona keyboard soundtrack, the animated cartoon lightning-bolts, both the urban and the rural set pieces—all of them scream ‘made for TV’ and ‘bottle-cap budget’. But despite its limitations, Feriengewitter more than makes up in heart what it lacks in technical effects.

Indeed, one of the reasons that the film works so well is that the acting is so convincing. Étienne Charle’s subtle expressions—from smile to sulk to scoff to stare—make his Dani instantly believable as a pubescent boy who tries to navigate his parents’ estrangement and immanent divorce at the same time as he sorts out his own first explorations into romantic affection with Lucie. Acting opposite him, Sandra Puhlmann easily holds her own with an irrepressible, plucky, foul-mouthed charm. And even the tired, squabbling parents, played by Joachim Lätsch and Bärbel Röhl, handle their roles well, such that we can believe that there’s still chemistry between them even though they say they’re at quits. It’s rare even today to see actors of this age handle so deftly a script which crams this degree of emotional complexity into a ninety-minute runtime.

There are too many TV shows and movies nowadays, both in America and elsewhere, which glamourise or trivialise divorce: which sympathise with the adults over the kids; which treat individual desire, emotional and physical gratification as the natural goods which should be served by marriage, rather than any sort of common whole; and which treat marriage as completely soluble when those goods are not served to one spouse’s satisfaction. Feriengewitter shows us, in ways both subtle and overt, the seriousness of the impact on the kids, as well as on the adults—as Peter and Rosi look over old photographs of themselves with Dani on the dining-room table at their flat in Berlin, for example. It’s also a film that doesn’t patronise or sugarcoat childhood. With the foregoing caveat that I’m evaluating Feriengewitter at a remove both in cultural and physical space (an American watching a German film) and in time (an adult in the 2020s watching a kids’ film from the 1980s), it’s still somewhat refreshing to see a film made for kids that portrays tweens and early teens fighting, cussing, smoking cigarettes, swilling hard liquor, getting revenge and doing stupid life-threatening stunts to impress each other… without approving of it, and also without using a sledgehammer to moralise over it.

Watching it today, though, I can imagine a good part of Feriengewitter’s appeal would come from its Ostalgie value. The East German kids who would have grown up watching this movie on television would be probably five to ten years older than I am, and I can well imagine it has the same value to them that kids’ TV shows from the 1990s (like Ghostwriter) have for me. Considering even this factor, though, objectively I still think this is very much a solid film with a well-crafted script. I very much recommend it.

Eine Liebe in Deutschland: a review

Stani (Piotr Lysek) and Pauline (Hanna Schygulla) in Eine Liebe in Deutschland

The 1983 East German film Eine Liebe in Deutschland (A Love in Germany), directed by Andrzej Wajda, is half-romance, half-political morality play. There is a semi-romantic central plotline in it. But more than that it is a film about moral trauma, specifically the moral trauma inflicted upon the German population by the fascist ideology. The presence of a mechanised, militarised state in the background running everything has a corrosive effect upon the soul. This film is, in a certain sense, a meditation on this corrosion: it is a meditation on how decent, caring, ordinary people in Germany could turn cruel in the presence of this ideology. It showcases how even petty jealousy, greed, suspicion, grief, fear of reprisal—what the Catholics would call ‘venialities’—can be alchemically transmuted into inhuman atrocities in the presence of such an ideology.

The framing alternates between Herbert Kropp (Otto Sander) and his son Klaus in the present day, exploring the town of Brombach in an attempt to find out what happened to Kropp’s mother; and flashbacks to the Second World War and Pauline Kropp’s life as a soldier’s wife on the home front. This device is, unfortunately, handled with all the narrative subtlety and deftness of a crowbar. The transitions between past and present are usually there to serve a cause. That is: they highlight a point of irony or black humour; or they demonstrate certain hypocrisies or euphemisms or failures of memory in those who lived during that time; or they explore the traumas and survivors’ guilt that afflicts them.

The central storyline, about the love-affair between the married Pauline Kropp (Hanna Schygulla) and the younger Polish POW Stanislaw Zasada (Piotr Lysak), is in a certain sense only the central hanger on which the rest of the mobile spins. The tale is told through the eyes of Kropp’s son Herbert, who provides the occasional narration from his current perspective. Even though Kropp is an adulteress and thus clearly morally compromised, in a certain sense she’s the most morally consistent and centred of her peers. Her ‘friends’ in the village all to some degree play a role in her and Zasada being discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. The case lands in the lap of an army commander, Lieutenant Meyer (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose intentions start off as ‘good’ to a certain extent, but whose decision-making is at every step compromised in grotesque ways: by Nazi ideology, by the orders of his superiors, and by ‘regulations’. In the end, Kropp is sent to a concentration camp, and Zasada is (incompetently) hanged.

For some reason I feel like the male characters in this movie got something of a fairer shake than the female ones. Whether it’s Herr Wyler (Gérard Desarthe), the sub-rosa antifascist who unsuccessfully pleads with his cupiditous wife not to inform on Pauline; or Melchior who allows Zasada to eat at the table with him despite it being against regulations—and later turns a blind eye to his affair with Kropp; or even Lieutenant Meyer who makes these half-arsed attempts within the scope of the Nazi bureaucracy to let Kropp and Zasada ‘off the hook’… they seem to get more sympathy from Wajda than the women do. At the same time, though, Wajda lets us see more clearly how the women face their moral universe and the contours within which they allow themselves to make compromises with the Nazi state and ideology.

To a certain degree, I feel like this movie deserved to have been scripted with greater subtlety and care than it was. The acting, particularly from Schygulla and Mueller-Stahl, is truly top-class; and the greater point of the film regarding the stories of the war that went untold and the secrets and small acts of collaboration that went unspoken in guilt or deliberate misremembrance—is a point worth exploring and telling well. (I feel like I need to watch that Kate Winslet movie The Reader after this; it seems to explore a similar point about guilt, memory and moral trauma.)

There are some darkly comedic moments to the movie, like when Meyer, his fumbling subordinate Schulze and Dr Borg all attempt to use hair and eye palettes, measuring tapes and phrenology equipment in an attempt to prove that Zasada is ‘Aryan’ so that Kropp can be gotten off of the charge of breaking the laws against ‘Rassenschande’; or when Meyer pathetically attempts to bribe a Polish high school teacher into being Zasada’s executioner. However, these flickers of farce only serve to demonstrate the dehumanising monstrosity that undergirds all of these comic absurdities: the treatment of human beings as essentially equivalent to breeding-stock, or the absolute negotiability of dignity and conscience in the face of a state with no regard for human life.

The romance plot is carried almost entirely by Schygulla’s on-screen magnetism – her complete command of her facial features and her ability to charm and smoulder with nothing more than a glance. Her male-lead counterpart, Lysak, is competent (and he can chew scenery with the best of them, especially during the medical examination scene), but most of the time he seems a bit hapless in the face of the shopkeeper’s shielded—but deep and scalding—emotions.

In the end, if I were to recommend A Love in Germany, it would be on the basis of Schygulla’s performance, as well as on some of the disturbing-but-needful ethical-psychological explorations in the middle. But the framing and a lot of the overarching narration is needlessly ham-handed, and I feel like the point about guilt and memory could have been made far better without Otto Sander’s fourth-wall-breaking monologues at the viewer at the beginning and end. I suspect that there are better movies about life-behind-the-lines in WWII Germany out there than this one.

Bumer: a slice of the Russian nineties

Cat (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), Killa (Maksim Konovalov), Rama (Sergei Gorobchenko) and Burnout (Andrei Merzlikin) in Bumer

Following up on my reviews of Brat and Brat 2, I decided to take a look at the Pyotr Buslov film Bumer [«Бумер», or Bimmer], which was billed to me as thematically similar to Balabanov’s Bagrov saga, and as enjoying a similar cult status. It was similarly also shot on a relative shoe-string budget – not nearly as barebones as the original Brat, though – and had an acerbically critical, satirical view of Russia in the 1990s under Eltsin. Long story short: the film does not disappoint.

It has gritty road-movie stylings, but I would call this film a black ‘tragicomedy’, sometimes bordering on farce. The storyline is fairly simple, and it won’t be spoiling too much to lay it out in the broad strokes. It’s a movie about four ‘brothers’ in the same gang – low-level street criminals in Russia who steal a black BMW. They get in over their heads when they come for revenge against some slightly higher-level street criminals who trashed and then stole their previous Mercedes – and mistakenly kill an undercover FSB agent. Suddenly on the list of Moscow’s most wanted, they flee into the countryside in their stolen car and try to lay low. However, the main characters’ greed, their desire for ‘prestige’, and their acculturation into street-tough behaviour, always manage to catch up to them no matter where they go. It doesn’t help that much (but not quite all) of the society around them is as venial, as grasping, and often as eager for violence as they are.

The main characters are Konstantin, nicknamed ‘Cat’ (Vladimir Vdovichenkov); Dimon, nicknamed ‘Burnout’ (Andrei Merzlikin); Lyoha, nicknamed ‘Killa’ (Maksim Konovalov); and Petya, nicknamed ‘Rama’ (Sergei Gorobchenko). It is telling that the ‘brotherhood’ that these four young men forge with each other is the strongest social bond in the entire film – but it also arises practically entirely without context. It is irrational. It is also (self-)destructive. There is a certain touching element to the fact that these four ‘have each other’s backs’ and that their relationship isn’t purely transactional.

That separates this relationship from practically all of the rest of the male relationships shown on-screen: the ‘shock doctrine’ capitalism has torn all previously existing relationships to shreds. The symbols of the old Soviet state which we get to see and hear, the slogans of togetherness and camaraderie, are all faded, impotent, in the background – tossed off as a joke, almost.

But given the lawless, dog-eat-dog social environment they live in, there’s little left for them to bond over but ripping off, extorting, cheating or stealing from everyone else. There is a sado-masochistic element to their relationship: they don’t know any other way to demonstrate care for each other than by acting tough and daring each other to new heights of criminal recklessness. There is a tragic element to this, because it causes Cat to fall out with his girlfriend (Anastasiya Sapozhnikova), who moves out on him when she realises she can’t compete with Cat’s ‘brotherhood’ (and understands perfectly well that it will mean visiting him in prison or mourning over his grave). It also causes Petya to leave a village girl, Kat’ka (Yana Shivkova) – who ends up pregnant with his child – after making promises to return to her (which it turns out he can’t keep).

But if the rôle of women in this film seems to serve only as passive observers or as victims of the cruelty of men, then it is telling that older men seem to have no rôle to play at all. This is a film without fathers. Kat’ka has only a mother, Sobachikha (Lyudmila Polyakova), who serves as something of a Greek chorus in the film, delivering prophetic pronouncements and wise advice which the protagonists cannot or will not heed. We are shown that Kat’ka’s child grows up without a father. The young boy whom the four young men meet at a gas station is shown to have no father. And none of these young men are shown as having fathers of their own. It is a generational deprivation which is as glaring and conspicuous as that shown in Tuǵan jer or Igla.

By comparison, the significant relationships that the main characters have, seem to be primarily with technology: guns, cars, mobile phones. But the point gets driven home time and again. Every time they rely on technology to help them, it fails. Dimon’s gun fails to shoot, and the wielder gets stabbed in the gut with a screwdriver. The truck driver who stabbed Dimon with the screwdriver throws a willing, topless woman out of his cabin into the snow when she touches it. She curses him that his truck cabin will fall on him and kill him: this happens. A radio comes on at just the wrong time for a message (called into a pop music DJ) to reach its intended recipient. A cellphone keeps ringing – a musical motif throughout the film – but the owner (Cat) is never around to pick it up, and when he seemingly comes to his senses and tries to reach his girlfriend on it, he finds out she is gone. And of course the eponymous BMW is a never-ending source of trouble for the ‘brothers’. They can’t get rid of it since they need it to escape Moscow, yet it betrays them – to the police, to the local protection rackets – at every opportunity. Ultimately it gets abandoned in the woods, with the headlights left on until the battery dies. There’s something almost Biblical in the way that the characters’ possessions and tough-guy status markers always seem to turn on them.

Again, this film was shot on a (comparatively) shoe-string budget, and it shows. The lighting is dim, the sets often feel cramped and the camerawork is mostly flat and static. But the filmmakers themselves actually use their technological limitations to great effect, whether for deadpan comic and black humour moments (of which there are more than a few), or else for a shot framing which has a particular symbolic significance. This isn’t a Tarantino or a Scorsese movie – even though we can see some tip-of-the-hat homages and stylistic references to both directors in the film. Even so, it’s a worthy entry into the Russian gangster film genre, and it’s easy to see why this film continues to enjoy its cult following.

The Heavy Anglo Ortho ‘Films of K-stan’ Review Series

Okay, 2020 has really been sucky enough a year as it is. But, the plague persists, and today we have also to deal with the release on Jeff Bezos’s platform of a sequel to an American nonmedy that should not have been made in the first place, and will not be named here out of general concern for good taste. In place of any consideration of either this downward-punching buffoon or his filmography, I thought it would be a good time to put together a list of the actual Kazakhstani films I have seen and reviewed on this blog. I intend to be adding to this list for the foreseeable future, so stay tuned and do not be surprised if this list grows.

The following list started out as a Kazakhstani film series, kicked off in part by my having watched the Veit Helmer comedy Baikonur and reminded of how much I liked the big ham that was Sergei Bodrov, Sr’s Nomad. Subsequently I decided to invest the time and the energy into that interest which dates back to the beginning of this blog, and explore the Kazakh film world. I found some things I did not expect there: like the linkages between Kazakh historical films and the epic poetry of Central Asia. But it soon morphed in two different, though related, directions. Films began to be added to it, like Shaman, that were focussed on the traditional cultures of Northern and Central Asia. And other films began to be added to it, like Brat, that were retrospective evaluations of the Soviet legacy and explorations of the post-Soviet condition. Obviously, these three thematic considerations overlap considerably.

Kazakhstani film is a world all its own, as I have found: as broad and vast as the country which its people inhabit. There are commercial blockbusters and pretentious art films. There are films which look to the past, films which look to the future, and even the odd film like Baikonur which manages to do both at the same time. There are films which celebrate Kazakh martial might and vigour, and there are films which lament Kazakhstan’s corrupt politics. There are directors in Kazakhstan who are incurable romantics who explore both sisterly and romantic love with a touchingly sensitive eye (Gulshat Omarova), and those who are bitter sceptics whose understanding of politics elevates a keen sense of tragœdy (Ardak Ámirqulov). From farcical comedies to psychological thrillers to gangster films to high fantasy to sweeping epic historical dramas, Kazakhstani film really does have something for everyone. Gentle reader, please do yourself a favour: go and watch one of these real Kazakhstani films, rather than that dreck which just got dumped on Amazon Prime.

Here is the full list of films I have done in this series, in chronological order by year of release.

~~~

Films of Kazakhstan:
Amangeldy (1938)†
Ivan Groznyi [Ivan the Terrible] (1944)
Pervyi eshelon [The First Echelon] (1956)
Tuǵan jer [Land of the Fathers] (1966)
Qyz-Jibek (1970)
Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu [They Fought for their Country] (1975)†
Igla [The Needle] (1988)
Mest’ [Revenge] (1989)
Otyrardyń kúıreýi [The Fall of Otrar] (1991)
Kaırat (1992)
Kardiogramma [Cardiogram] (1995)
Kavkazskii plennik [Prisoner of the Caucasus] (1996)
Killer (1998)
Sëstry [Sisters] (2001)
Shıza [The Recruiter] (2004)
Nochnoi dozor [Night Watch] (2004)
Kóshpendiler [Nomad] (2005)
Ulzhan (2007)
Réketır [Racketeer] (2007)
Mongol (2007)
Tulpan (2008)
Qosh bol, Gúlsary! [Farewell, Gulsary!] (2008)
Baksy [Native Dancer] (2008)
Kelin (2009)
Baikonur (2011)
Jaýjúrek myń bala [Warriors of the Steppe] (2011)
Shal [The Old Man] (2012)
Stýdent [The Student] (2012)
Ya ne vernus’ [I Won’t Go Back] (2014)
Begletsy [Runaways] (2014)
Anaǵa aparar jol [The Road to Mother] (2016)
28 Panfilovtsev [Panfilov’s 28 Men] (2016)

Films of North and Central Asia:
Beloe solntse pustyni [White Sun of the Desert] (1970)
Dersu Uzala (1975)
Shaman (1996)
Skif [The Last Warrior] (2018)

Films about the post-Soviet condition:
Brat [Brother] (1997)
Brat 2 [Brother 2] (2000)
Bumer (2003)
Absurdistan (2008)
Ovsyanki [Silent Souls] (2010)

† Not a Kazakhstani film proper, but a Soviet film which had a significant impact on the popular consciousness in Kazakhstan, and the style and themes of Kazakh film culture.

Your Name 《君の名は。》

I want to help build landscapes that leave heart-warming memories… I didn’t even know anybody in that town. Why does the scenery of a town that no longer exists wring my heart so?

Back when I did my review of Flavours of Youth I promised I’d get around to seeing this film: Your Name, directed by Shinkai Makoto 新海诚. In short, I’m incredibly glad I did. This film is a masterpiece, one which well deserves its reputation as a classic of Japanese animation.

Your Name is best described as a fantasy/sci-fi romance, which speaks directly to a Japanese but also a more broadly East Asian experience of being disconnected in time, of the tensions and antinomies that arise from being part of a landscape where ageless antiquity and glittering hyper-modernity exist side-by-side. But the two main characters, despite their frequent and sometimes heartbreaking alienation which sometimes takes the form of literal jumps in time, still seek a genuine connexion with each other. And the heart of the film rests in how they mature and grow.

Your Name is a story that defies easy categorisation. It’s a story about a (literal) disaster, when a comet strikes a remote, traditional Japanese town. It’s also a bildungsroman and a breathtakingly bittersweet teen romance. It freely borrows from SFnal tropes about time-travel (including multiple timelines and alternate futures), as well as fantasy tropes about body-swapping (think the Warehouse 13 episode ‘Merge with Caution’). It is steeped in traditional Chinese lore, Daoism and Shintô religious rites, but it also has the feel of a young-adult fantasy book by TA Barron. It would be easy for any feature film, but particularly a Japanese animated one, with this many moving parts to feel overstuffed, overwrought and pretentious. But Your Name avoids this in part because of the tender vulnerability and humanity of the two protagonists.

Your Name uses a lot of traditional tropes from East Asian literature that might get lost on American audiences. The ‘red thread of fate’ is probably a familiar enough one, and it gets used liberally here between the two protagonists. The ‘butterfly dream’ of Zhuangzi is also alluded to. The tradition of fermenting rice wine with human saliva (kuchikamizake 口嚼酒) plays an important rôle in the story. And despite all the fractures and disconnects in time that occur between the two protagonists, there is a subtle but persistent theme of continuity, of history repeating itself, of déjà vu.

A comet, whose orbit comes within sight of Earth once every 1200 years, passes overhead. As it enters Earth’s gravity well, its nucleus fractures, producing a spectacular meteor shower. One of these fragments is large enough to fall on the village of Itomori. It destroys the town and kills 500 of its inhabitants. Two young teenagers look up at the night sky and watch the comet streak across. One of them, Tachibana Taki 立花泷 is a high-schooler and part-time waiter in a fancy restaurant in Shinjuku ward in Tôkyô. The other, Miyamizu Mitsuha 宫水三叶, is a high schooler in Itomori, and one of the two granddaughters of the keeper of the local Shintô shrine there.

Mitsuha is frustrated with her limited surroundings, being (embarrassingly) involved in the rites of the shrine, getting unwanted attention from being the village mayor’s daughter, and feeling like she’s trapped in a fishbowl. She screams from underneath the torii that she hates her life, she hates her town, and she wishes she could be reincarnated as a handsome boy in Tôkyô. Not long after this, Mitsuha and Taki begin to have strange dreams.

Formerly, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. But between Zhou and a butterfly there must be a difference.

昔者莊周夢為胡蝶，栩栩然胡蝶也，自喻適志與！不知周也。俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。不知周之夢為胡蝶與，胡蝶之夢為周與？周與胡蝶，則必有分矣。此之謂物化。

As though in answer to Mitsuha’s wish, Mitsuha and Taki begin swapping bodies, randomly, whenever they fall asleep. This part of the story might have been handled gratuitously or exploitatively, and sometimes it rides the line. (What’s the first thing Pete does when Robert Louis Stevenson’s bookends trap him in Myka’s body? Yup, Taki does the same thing. Typical teenage boy.) But Taki and Mitsuha are quickly intrigued by each other in deeper ways. Mitsuha finally gets to visit Tôkyô, go out to eat in stylish urban cafés, and hold down a job in a fancy restaurant. And Taki is enchanted by the charming architecture and wondrous vistas of Itomori – including the huge round lake which is very clearly and ominously a crater.

The two teenagers quickly begin setting ground rules for each other, what they are and aren’t allowed to do in each other’s bodies, leaving each other messages including by writing on each other’s hands and wrists with marker. Going through each other’s smartphones, they learn details about each other’s lives that they can appreciate. Taki begins asserting himself among Mitsuha’s classmates to get them to stop teasing her. And Mitsuha sets Taki up with an older girl at his workplace, Okudera, whom he has a crush on, and tells him in a message that he should be able to see the comet that night.

Taki’s date with Okudera goes poorly and no comet appears. He tries calling Mitsuha with the number she left him, and she doesn’t answer. The body-switching stops, but Taki can’t forget about the dreams he had from when he was Mitsuha. He then embarks, together with Okudera and his classmate Tsukasa, on a half-baked quest to find Mitsuha and her village. The only thing he has to go on, though, since he can’t remember her name or the name of the village, are the landscape drawings and sketches he did of the views from her house and the temple. An old man recognises his sketch as that of Itomori before the disaster, and Taki ultimately learns from him that Mitsuha was killed along with the rest of the village when the comet struck Itomori three years before.

Taki decides to leave Okudera and Tsukasa to try and find the holy place where Mitsuha’s grandmother took her to pay respects to the old Shintô god that had come 1200 years ago. It happens to be in the middle of a crater – and Mitsuha’s grandmother had told her that crossing over into the grounds of the shrine was like taking a step into the underworld. Taki finds the rice wine that Mitsuha made inside the shrine, and drinks it. This reconnects Mitsuha and Taki, and allows the two of them to rewrite the history of Itomori and save the townspeople from the impact of the comet fragment. But, as history changes, the dream ends, and the two of them lose each other again, even forgetting each other’s names…

I’m not going to spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say this: Shinkai Makoto has a brilliant and touching ‘ear’ for the voices of young adults. He makes real the connexion between these two people, so utterly different from one another and separated by time, space, class, sex, tradition and modernity. Although the director very cautiously refrains from overtly editorialising at any point in the film – with one partial exception – one gets the distinct impression that the same longing the characters feel for each other is connected intimately to a sense of loss of the traditions that Mitsuha embodies in her life even as she rebels against them.

One sees this same sort of traditionalism, actually, even in the gender-bending body-swap plot. Even though it’s a explicitly a comic point to see ‘Taki’ (inhabited by Mitsuha’s consciousness) act like a traditional-minded Japanese girl, and ‘Mitsuha’ (actually Taki) behave live a typical urban high-school boy – right down to their body language and pronouns (‘Taki’ almost gives the game away by calling himself by the feminine ‘watashi 私’ before landing on the more masculine ‘ore 俺’) – they each come to have a tender respect for each other’s physical embodiedness and an active interest in each other’s social lives. There is an almost Ruist sensibility here, in that Taki and Mitsuha come to understand and love each other by experiencing relationships with friends, family and surroundings through each other’s eyes.

The single most strained relationship in the film, actually, is that between Mitsuha and her father, who is a (presumably ruling-party) politician in the town, and who rather callously left his daughters behind with his shrine-keeping mother-in-law after their mother died. Throughout the film Mitsuha’s father refuses to listen to her or take her seriously. This is where I think the partial exception to Shinkai’s refusal to editorialise comes in. Mitsuha’s father represents a deliberate rupture with tradition even though he uses it to attain his personal goals.

As to be expected from a CoMix Wave production, the animation quality is amazing, even if – by Shinkai Makoto’s own admission – not quite reaching the Studio Ghibli gold standard. Both the urban and the rural backdrops are lovingly, painstakingly rendered – as though each frame is meant to be a landscape painting. The technical and stylistic use of proportion and perspective, also, enhance the thematic preoccupations with separation and reunion, rupture and continuity, alienation and connexion. I highly, highly recommend this film.

EDIT: Also, the title of the film called to mind this Tad Morose song, the lyrics to which seem almost appropriate at times:

How Joanna Cole informed my early Russophilia

An illustration from The Flying Ship

This past Sunday saw the passing of the outstanding, beloved children’s author Joanna Cole. For many – including for myself and my children – her Magic School Bus series of books were some of our first explorations into the world of the natural sciences, and for these contributions to children’s literature Joanna Cole is rightly remembered and honoured. But for me, ever since I was seven years old, Ms Cole’s name is also indelibly associated with a collection of folktales, the Best-Loved Folktales of the World, which (as the title suggests) she compiled from a vast variety of cultures and times from around the globe. This book, an old favourite, has followed me around everywhere and always occupied a place of honour on my bookshelf long into my adulthood.

Children are enchanted by folktales, and I was no exception – but folktales are by no means a childish thing. Indeed, Joanna Cole put together this collection as much for adults – not just parents – as for children. Because prior to the invention of the printing press, most written materials were in fact the self-narration of the élite classes, folklore and folktales are a pristine window into the lives, concerns, struggles and aspirations of the common people. This was one of the big draws of folklore for scholars like the Brothers Grimm, August von Haxthausen, Julius Krohn, Marianna Kambouroglou and Pyotr Kireevskii. As Joanna Cole herself put it:

Because they are the products of preliterate societies, the folktales, unlike our modern novels and short stories, were not invented by a single author and printed in a book to be read unchanged forever. Instead, they were passed by word of mouth from one teller to another, never told twice in exactly the same way. This oral tradition made for a unique intimacy between teller and listeners, and the give and take with the audience no doubt influenced the form of the tales. Thus the stories express the wishes, hopes and fears of many people, rather than the concerns of a particular writer, and they deal with universal human dilemmas that span differences of age, culture and geography.

When heard again and again throughout a lifetime, the tales served not only to entertain but to transmit the values and wisdom of the culture, imbue a strong sense of right and wrong, and provide a reservoir of vivid images that became part of the individual’s imagination and even of his everyday language.

Joanna Cole acknowledges both the universal themes in the body of folklore she herself selected to transmit to another generation, and the particularities of the cultures she sought to represent in translating and compiling them. Indeed, one of her methodologies in this book is to attempt to find a source for the story that is as close as possible to the oral tradition, and then to write in-character in an attempt to transmit the style and voice of the storyteller. Small wonder indeed, that a seven-year-old would, upon stumbling on this book, at once find himself mesmerised by the many voices in Cole’s storytelling!

It was natural that I should gravitate toward the folktales of certain cultures within the book. I was drawn to the trickster-spider Anansi stories of the Ashanti tribe of West Africa. I enjoyed the underdog tales of small, less-regarded children against giants and ogres in English folklore – or the parallel adventures of younger sons against enchanters and trolls in the folklore of Northern Europe. But the folktales that I kept coming back to, time and again, were the stories from Russia: ‘The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship’, ‘The Firebird, the Horse of Power and Princess Vasilissa’, ‘Prince Hedgehog’ and ‘Salt’. The heroes of these stories are remarkable not for their book-smarts or martial prowess, let alone for their wealth. The Fool of the World and the simple Ivan are, in fact, far less than clever to begin with, have no real special abilities and are even belittled by their parents. And even if the heroes in these tales are possessed of cleverness (like Prince Hedgehog) or martial prowess (like the archer in the story of the Horse of Power), they are never saved from danger by their natural gifts but instead by a mixture of faith, compassion and an innate sense of fair play – as well as a certain kind of natural cunning which the villains always seem to underestimate.

I quickly came to admire, and even internalise to a degree, these deeply humane aspects in the moral substratum, by which the folklore of Russia represented the values and wisdom of its common people. As such, the Western ‘meritocratic’ præoccupations, that we should judge people by how smart they are or by how strong they are, never really rubbed me the right way. By the way, you can see from some of the East Asian folktales in this collection – like ‘The Wife’s Portrait’, ‘The Magic Brocade’ and ‘Mister Lazybones’ – that the idea of ‘merit’ in cultures influenced by Ru ideology is very different from the modern Western idea. East Asian ‘merit’, at least in its folk conception rather than in its Legalist one, has a lot more to do with fulfilling filial duties and confining oneself to the appropriate social rôles, than with showing off book-smarts or military strategy. It seems interesting – though not surprising – that the dangers of the usual East Asian studies tack, of conflating Rujia with the disembodied and rationalised ethics of the Enlightenment (which indeed tore up in Europe many of the social substrata upon which Ru ethics in China were built), are brought to the fore and thrown into such sharp relief by the study of East Asian folklore.

The folklore of Russia – and in particular the Great-Russian folklore of Novgorod, in whose vicinity Arthur Ransome lived and collected the folktales that would go into Old Peter, and from there into Joanna Cole’s collection – has retained on the flipside much of the old kenotic radicalism of the Rus’ polity, long after it was abandoned by princes and chroniclers and even churchmen. In this folklore, the ordinary muzhik, even – nay, especially – if he is a simpleton, is often allowed to triumph over tyrannical tsars, mighty giants, violent generals and jealous older brothers. And this triumph occurs occasionally on account of the muzhik’s underhanded cunning, but more often on account of his natural good nature, his instinctive generosity, and most of all his simple faith in God.

On another note: it’s hard not to see the impress of heroes like Ivan and the Fool of the World on the protagonists in Russian cinema. The Kazakh youngster Mustafa in Shıza, Vanya in Kavkazskii plennik, Danila Bagrov in the Brat films, even (to a certain extent) Kris and later Anya in Ya ne vernus’, all embody in a certain sense this distinctively Great-Russian folkloric archetype. They all seem to have these same characteristics of faith, fair play and an instinctive underdog cunning that are hinted at in Ivan and in the Fool of the World – even though the archetype is occasionally played with or subverted in the transition to film.

May God grant unto Joanna Cole everlasting rest, and make her memory to be æternal! It’s interesting to me to discover that the authorial genius behind the Magic School Bus books, indeed did have a profound impact on me and particularly upon my respect and affinity for Russian culture – though this was one signpost I had nearly forgotten until now. Perhaps I’ll go back and read ‘Salt’ again tonight.

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.

Killer: a cab driver’s life in interesting times

Marat (Talgat Asetov) in Killer

If there’s one English phrase that makes every Asian studies major and every China hand wince, it’s this: ‘May you live in interesting times’. Unfortunately, it belongs to a considerable collection of pseudo-Confucian aphorisms and ancient Chinese proverbs of dubious origin, which have accumulated in Western languages over the decades and centuries as something of a relic of chinoiserie: attributing wisdoms both earthy and mystical to a mistily-distant exotic oriental antiquity. Unfortunately, despite even the heroic attempts by Russian Orthodox missionary churchmen to demystify China to their countrymen, it seems even post-Soviet artists have picked up a few of our bad old Jesuitical Western habits.

Sorry to go on a mini-rant, there, but my recent watch of Dárejan Ómirbaev’s 1998 film Killer [in Kazakh, Shilge; in French, Tueur à gages] brought it to mind. This orientalist cliché in its Russian form, ‘Не дай вам Бог жить в эпоху перемен’, serves as the film’s tagline. Even if this mudrost’ is incorrectly attributed, the point of the film is well made, and that point is nothing at all like the misty exoticism the tagline might otherwise imply. It also places Ómirbaev in a kind of spiritual kinship with modern Chinese indie filmmakers like Jia Zhangke. Here, Ómirbaev poignantly takes on the same concerns and themes that drive films like Shıza and Réketır, but he does so in a much darker and more understated way.

The story is straightforward. Ómirbaev details the unfortunate life of a cab driver, Marat (Talgat Asetov – who had a supporting role in Kaırat), who is forced into crime when he accidentally rear-ends a Mercedes and finds himself out of money to pay back the other driver. Events spiral out of control from there. His sister gets cheated out of her savings by fake investors, so his family can’t help him out. He has to borrow money from a loan shark. Marat gets beaten up by the Mercedes owner’s hirelings. He loses his job when his employer commits suicide. He tries to buy a new car, but it promptly gets stolen. His newborn son contracts an early childhood illness which demands expensive therapy. As he gets deeper and deeper into debt, his situation looking increasingly hopeless, the loan shark offers him a way out that involves taking a life.

Killer is uncompromisingly bleak from start to finish. The otherwise dingy palette is dominated by dark blues and dark reds. There is little of Kazakhstan’s natural beauty to be seen (unless it’s out the window of a moving car); instead, we are thrown into a world of decaying Soviet concrete apartments, garages and bars, illuminated where appropriate by fluorescent lights. There are hints early on in the film that drive home the destructive callousness of shock therapy and gangster capitalism that Ómirbaev tries to convey. The mathematics professor Marat works for, Berik Qaraqululy Qasımov, complains that there is no room for proper science in a society where everything is commercialised and where everyone is thrown into insecurity and chaos – and he later commits suicide in his office. ‘Don’t think about tomorrow,’ says the bartender Oleg, as he persuades Marat to borrow money from the loan shark Erjan Shakenovich at an interest rate of 1% per day. Everything is for sale under capitalism: honour, pride, and in the end even basic human morality. Just as in Shıza and Réketır, boxing is taken as the preferred cinematic metaphor for the brutal, cutthroat competition that pits the weak against the strong: though here, it’s portrayed on television screens.

The hopelessness of ordinary Kazakh life under this œconomic anarchy is signalled in several ways. First of all, in a lengthy scene at the beginning of the film, the professor Marat works for can’t find his way out of the studio where he’s giving an interview: in a maze of nondescript hallways, he has to ask for help twice to find his way out. It’s also interesting that Marat’s wife Aijan (Roksana Abuova) takes an almost completely passive rôle in the film. Marat’s family provides him motivation, but they have no place in the cutthroat world outside, and Marat himself is powerless to protect them from it.

In a scene that’s typical Ómirbaev, one of the minor characters recites a lengthy excerpt from Kafka. (I can forgive him for this, because the tension and tight pacing of the film, with Marat being hounded and stalked through his labyrinthine environs like the prey of an unseen predator, shows us that Ómirbaev really gets Kafka.) Of course, it wouldn’t be an Ómirbaev movie, either, if the main character didn’t lose a fight and get beaten up, as happens to Marat off-screen when he tries to stop the thieves who steal his car. Ómirbaev also gives us repeated dream sequences: in Marat’s dreams he goes up to a rooftop, looking to throw himself off. In fact, the only real expression of hope comes from a journalist who is reading a newspaper by the riverside. He remarks to Marat on the differences between Kazakhstan, with its brutal winters, and countries with warmer climates that have no need for warm clothes or oil for heat – but he also says that spring is beautiful, and it’s worth weathering brutal winters for. Of course, this journalist promptly gets shot to death in front of his toddler son, because he had written a scathing piece about some well-connected businessmen’s plans to privatise a factory.

In addition to being the most unsparing of Ómirbaev’s films, Killer is also the most direct. In Killer Dárejan Ómirbaev shows himself to be an expert at listening for what Canadian conservative philosopher George Grant called ‘intimations of deprival’. The brooding pathos of Marat, and the despair of his academic employer, ruthlessly reflects an insecurity that was felt by millions across the former Soviet states in the wake of shock therapy. And the prominent placement of Pepsi and Coca-Cola logos throughout the film shows us exactly whom Ómirbaev believes is to blame. It’s telling that the teenage daughter of the loan shark is seen exactly once, reciting English lessons from a Walkman: later, her father is shown telling her over the phone to study and get a degree overseas so she can stay in America – because why would she want to come back?

Yet despite the film’s squarely anti-capitalist stance, and despite Berik Qasımov’s yearnings for the stability of the Soviet welfare state and employment policies, Ómirbaev shows very little sympathy for Soviet nostalgia. The closest he comes, in fact, is a scene in Oleg’s bar where go-go dancers do a striptease with Soviet naval suits, accompanied by an English song with the refrain ‘These are good times!’ Even there, the nostalgia is framed in an ironic way, as though the only way to celebrate the ‘good times’ happening now is to remember when Soviet times might have been better. The imagery of the Soviet legacy is turned into an instrument for cheap titillation. Like everything else, nostalgia is a commodity for sale.

This brings me back to the faux-classical Chinese mudrost’ that sets the tone for the film. Despite its grimness, Killer bears less resemblance to other post-Soviet Kazakhstani gangster movies than it does to the spare, quiet desperation of the movies of Jia Zhangke, like 2000’s Platform and 2002’s Unknown Pleasures. Both directors are deeply sensitive to the losses – in terms of human dignity and moral direction – that have been incurred by their respective nations’ transitions to capitalism and sexual licence. Both directors hint that the freedom promised by the unleashing of market forces upon people’s personal and work lives is, in fact, another form of imprisonment.

Ómirbaev continues in the traditions of the Kazakh New Wave, here. All the actors are drama school students or amateurs. And Ómirbaev continues to make subtle hat-tips to Igla in particular. Of Ómirbaev’s films, I would have to say that even though Kardiogramma features more impressive art direction, and even though Stýdent makes a clearer and more subtle use of its literary footholds, I think Killer is so far my favourite of his. Here Ómirbaev’s minimalist tendencies are tastefully restrained, and he expresses himself with an admirable œconomy of language and visuals. The result is a film that is crisp, precise and riveting. It features an immediately relatable protagonist, whose descent into crime is shown with a subtlety such that, even though the audience is rightly appalled by Marat’s criminal action, and even though we are not surprised at his abrupt end, we can’t help but sympathise with his reasons.

Stýdent: a Kazakh retelling of Crime and Punishment

Nurlan Baısatov as the student in Stýdent

Dárejan Ómirbaev turns his sights on classical Russian literature in his 2012 film Stýdent [Student], a modernised adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. The setting, of course, shifts from 19^th-century Saint Petersburg to 21^st-century Almaty. Dostoevsky’s Raskol’nikov becomes a nameless Kaırat-esque university student: emaciated, bespectacled, dressing in windbreakers and t-shirts that always seem to fit him too loosely, given to stares burning with seething repressed emotions. This representation of Raskol’nikov, it sometimes seems, is tailored to suit Ómirbaev’s preferred minimalistic style – practically no music, very little dialogue, incredibly heavy context and emotional subtext. But despite Ómirbaev tending to ‘write himself in’ to the novel in this way – something about which I have decidedly mixed feelings – many of the questions Dostoevsky explores in his original novel make the transition remarkably well. Ómirbaev brings Dostoevsky’s religious psychology to bear on a post-Soviet reality, and questions of capitalism versus socialism and materialism versus spirituality, in ways that make a certain degree of intuitive sense, and which follow the spirit of the novel closely, but not slavishly.

Our student (Nurlan Baısatov) starts out working as a camera operator on the set of a film directed by ‘Torebaev’ (Dárejan Ómirbaev in something of a self-deprecating cameo), who is then accosted by a student journalist (Ol’ga Korotko) who begins asking him if he’s ashamed of shooting ‘empty and shallow’ films that don’t engage serious problems. Meanwhile, one of the crew spills some tea on the lap of his leading lady (Ásel Saǵatova). The diva calls her big-shot banker boyfriend, who pulls up in an SUV with a couple of toughs, who drag the crewman into the bathroom and proceed to beat him to a bloody pulp while our student looks on in shock. This has ramifications for the student, who quits the film crew in disgust. Because he quit his job, he can’t make rent and is forced to make money in other ways.

After this opening scene, the main plot follows the beats of Dostoevsky’s novel incredibly faithfully – with a few twists. Instead of an axe, the student pawns his grandfather’s war medal for an old pistol and a magazine with three bullets. Instead of a pawnbroker, the student murders a callous magazin clerk who refuses to extend a credit line to an elderly pensioner – along with a woman who also happens to come into the store to shop. In this version of the story, Marmeladov is transmogrified into an elderly poet (Edige Bolysbaev) who writes verse in Kazakh, and his daughter Saniya is a deaf-mute who does all the housework for her drunk father and her wheelchair-bound mother. The student’s family includes a caring mother, and a younger sister Arujan who goes to med school in Atyrau. The Razumihin of this film adaptation is the student’s leather-rocking classmate Marat, who struggles with him to comprehend the worldview of the university lecturers.

This film has a number of throwbacks and hat-tips to earlier films of the Kazakh New Wave – of which Ómirbaev was himself very much a part, with Kaırat and Kardiogramma. Apart from Ásel Saǵatova (who played Saıan’s girlfriend in Réketır) and Ómirbaev himself, the cast is entirely made up – in good Kazakh New Wave tradition – of theatre-school and film-school students and amateur actors. As in Kaırat, here are often TV sets in the frame, and they are often turned on. But the way they are used is much more a hat-tip to Igla, where they foreshadow some element of the plot, or carry some sort of symbolism which Ómirbaev wants to convey to the viewer. Nature programmes often show predatory animals bringing down their prey, for example. And the greedy convenience store clerk is always seen watching historical footage of American presidents like George HW Bush; just before the student kills him, he’s watching a documentary on the Kennedy assassination!

Stýdent also deliberately frames our student’s inner struggles with ideology, courage and authenticity against a backdrop showcasing the amorality of Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet nouveaux riches: a theme deftly introduced by the opening scene with the diva actress who sics her husband’s hired goons on the film crew. In the same scene where the student meets the drunken elderly poet, two security guards are talking about how their employer’s dog eats better meat than they do, and how the daughter drives a hand-assembled German sports car worth $400,000. In another scene, a donkey driver attempts to help a young couple pull their Range Rover out of a ditch – when it takes too long, the young man in a fit of rage gets out of the Range Rover, grabs a golf club and brains the unoffending donkey with it, before getting back in the SUV and driving off. This is juxtaposed against the struggles of practically everyone else struggling to make ends meet. In the university lecture halls, a young female professor preaches to her class, including our student and his classmate Marat, about the failures of socialism and the superiority of the capitalist ‘law of the jungle’ where the strong triumph in ruthless competition, and where the disappearance of the weak is the tragic but necessary price of progress. It is Marat who gives voice to the question of whether this law of the jungle gives those who live under it licence to kill, but we do not hear the professor’s response.

There is another Kazakhstan which is alluded to by the elderly poet, by the student’s own mother and sister, and of course by Saniya. This is the Kazakhstan which has not forgotten its past. There is a strong undercurrent of spirituality here. Unlike in Aqan Sataev’s films, though, the spirituality alluded to in Stýdent is not exclusively Islâmic – although that element is certainly there. The student participates in a Muslim wake for the poet after he is found dead, and in the poet’s living room there’s a big old poster of none other than the great Kazakh poet, moralist and Neoplatonic-Sûfî philosopher Abaı Qunanbaıuly. It makes sense that a Kazakh poet would lionise Abaı and keep his portrait in a place of honour. But in the context of the film the poster of Abaı is placed and used almost in an iconographic sense.

But in the student’s dream sequences, his mother – the voice of conscience – appears to him while he is napping on a bench outside a Russian Orthodox Church, and this seems to be what prompts him to go to Saniya and confess his crime to her. In addition, the voice of this spirituality in this film is placed in the mouth of another university lecturer, an elderly Soviet professor who riffs on Weber and Spengler, and approvingly quotes Laozi 老子 as a source of communitarian spiritual values which are authentically applicable to the ‘harsh steppes’ of Kazakhstan. I don’t believe Dostoevsky would entirely approve of Ómirbaev’s quasi-Perennialist interpretation of his novel, because for him the central question of Crime and Punishment is that of: the ‘law of the jungle’, or Christ. Even so, this reading comes closer to his meaning than many other sæcular understandings of his work.

There are a number of little cinematic flourishes that render this adaptation of Crime and Punishment attractive and even charming – not least of which is the understated intensity of Nurlan Baısatov’s acting. But, I note with a little exasperation, Ómirbaev can’t help leaving his own impress on the adaptation. It wouldn’t be an Ómirbaev film unless: 1.) the protag has multiple dream sequences; 2.) the protag gets beaten up and bloodied in a fight; 3.) the protag’s friend recites a lengthy book passage to him while he listens impassively. Another pet peeve I had with this film: it’s one thing to have a cast that consists mostly of amateurs and students themselves: in fact, this is one thing about Kazakhstani cinema I find refreshing! But it’s quite another thing to shoot the film in such a way that it seems almost amateurish itself. The camera direction’s overuse of mid-distance static takes creates an unintentional source of comedy. And the sound editing seems to privilege atmospherics – in particular the sound of footfalls on concrete – over dialogue.

In all, as a modern adaptation of Crime and Punishment, Stýdent is well worth a watch, despite its Bressonian arthouse idiosyncracies and overall throwback feel. Dostoevsky might not approve of the Perennialist interpretation which downplays the central question of Christ. But he would certainly approve of how Ómirbaev posed the problem of how post-shock therapy hypercapitalist materialism has distorted human moral psychology in ex-Soviet states. In this he has a firm grasp on the contemporary ressourcement in Kazakhstan of not only Dostoevsky, but also Abaı Qunanbaıuly and the tradition of classical Chinese ethical philosophy, as articulated by authors like Orazaly Sábden.