Review of Tulpan

Sergei Dvortsevoy's "Tulpan"

Even in its most quiet moments, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s "Tulpan" feels loud and clear. The images in this film, the Kazakh filmmaker’s fifth movie and first feature, include swaths of sky and land, trotted on by cattle and barely cultivated. Swirls of sand form cyclones, hordes of livestock thump and run, the land is stretched flat indefinitely; if these visuals achieve anything, they certainly give Dvortsevoy’s film a sense of enormity and grandeur. They also make it difficult to deny how breathtaking this film is.

Describing "Tulpan" as such, however, is risky. That is, almost any work of art assigned to the realm of the “breathtaking” is vulnerable to being generalized about. But our aesthetic experiences aren’t simply responses to intangible or overwhelming sensations. Feeling – the kind we experience in all the great works of literature, music, painting, etc. – is rigid. As Dvortsevoy show us, feeling is alive and well in the cinema, too. But it’s the minutiae that make Tulpan feel breathtaking, and gives it the richness and complexity expected of exemplary cinema.

The film’s screenplay, written by Dvortsevoy and Gennadi Ostrovsky, concerns Asa (Askat Kuchinchirekov), a sailor who returns home, hoping to court the eponymous daughter of a village farmer and continue his life as both shepherd and husband in the landlocked country’s Betpak-Dala province. His closest comrade, a rambunctious tractor operator who stocks-up on images of nude women and speaks in odes about leaving the steppes for the city, acts as a counterpoint to the melancholic attitude that characterizes most of this film.

But Asa never does end up marrying the young Tulpan, who makes only minor, fleeting appearances on screen; nor does the city ever show itself in front of Dvortsevoy’s camera. Instead, the dreams and desires of these characters always remain on the periphery, on the fringes of the film frame or completely outside of it altogether.

The abandoned Kazakh plains are what we’re given, and what we’re left to look at. Here, cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska’s hand-held camerawork makes this an opportunity to pay attention to shifts in color and light, and deems no on-screen action – whether it be a little boy’s imitation of a steam engine, a housewife’s dinner preparations, a person washing their hands – too irrelevant or uninteresting to the overall scope of Dvortsevoy’s film.

This is a world where people are constantly mapping their feelings and desires. Something is always about to happen, or is happening, in a far-away place. Yet, for a film with characters who constantly dream about their futures, "Tulpan" wanders in the present, where children shout folk songs to one another and listen to scrambled radio broadcasts, contributing to the blend of cattle cries, bells, and wind howls that form the basis of Dvortsevoy’s soundtrack.

"Tulpan" was awarded the Certain Regard at Cannes in May, followed by its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival in September. As a work of narrative fiction, the film marks a shift for Dvortsevoy, whose previous efforts include ethnographic documentaries that make use of similarly deserted settings and people. His first film, "Chastie" (1996), works as a preface to "Tulpan’s" depictions of rural Kazakh life, although the earlier work reveals a filmmaker who is less interested in sentimentalizing his characters.

In effect, what gives Dvortsevoy’s film its distance is its use of techniques commonly associated with ethnographic filmmaking. One has the impression that the filmmaker is hesitant to get too close, is afraid to familiarize himself too much with his characters; thus, the camera in "Tulpan" is almost always at a distance, rarely cutting away from the action and always immensely curious about what it observes. This penchant for looking at other people – even if they are unflattering – is deeply moving precisely because it doesn’t want to make judgments. What thickens this film, what gives it feeling and imagination, is its humanity.

Posted on 11/11/08 by: Ricky D'Ambrose 12:18 AM