Kazakh Film: Chouga and Tulpan
FILMCATCHER @ NYFF BLOG- Every major film festival presents a gallery of cinema offerings and possible discoveries for those curious enough to seek out unfamiliar work by international narrative-film artists and imagemakers. The New York Film Festival may play it safe by screening films that already have theatrical distribution, like Steven Soderbergh’s twin-halved 262-minute epic Che (IFC Films, December) or Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (Fox Searchlight), but there are also a clutch of worthy, under-the-radar films at NYFF that Gothamites will have a rare chance to see projected on the big screen. These films deserve a broader audience, but due to the metrics of today’s distribution business and the viewing habits of most paying moviegoers, most will likely fall through the cracks.
Two new films from Kazakhstan—a former Soviet republic best known here due to the notorious antics of comedian Sasha Baron Coen (a/k/a Borat)—illustrate this point beautifully. The first is Chouga, a loose adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina updated to modern-day Central Asia by Kazakh master Darezhan Omirbaev. In the film, Ainur Turgambaeva plays a regal beauty who abandons her son and home life with an aging, indifferent MP to take up with an equally affluent but feckless young lover in Paris. While her choice is born of passion (“When real love comes knocking, people do incredible things,” one character opines), the outcome is anything but happy. Leisurely paced and stripped-down in appearance, Omirbaev’s film is a complex, subtle drama about romantic disillusionment in which shadings of dry humor and delicate emotion are conveyed in glances, gestures, and other nonverbal cues. At times, Chouga reminded me of Aki Kaurismaki’s own deadpan Dostoyevsky adaptation, Crime and Punishment, both for its minimal aesthetic style and flat affect. But there is a gentle poetry to Omirbaev’s personal vision that creeps into the bleak, color-bleached public spaces and modestly well-appointed homes that house his gallery of lovelorn and sexually dissatisfied characters. The director has a peculiar fascination with light fixtures—several times he holds on shots of lamps and chandelier medallions—as well as audiovisual screens (TVs, GameBoy, videotape). But he has a particular feel for capturing moments of solitude and inner reflection, too, whether the troubled Chouga’s rhythmically lit, then unlit face in a railway compartment, or an odd sequence where each of his primary characters is framed through a doorway, alone, until the hinge on their private world and unknowable thoughts swings shut, closing them off from us—and each other—for good.
Alongside this quintessentially urban fable of longing and disenchantment stands Tulpan, its yurt-dwelling country cousin at NYFF. Set on the barren, wind-blasted Hunger Steppe of southern Kazakhstan, the first feature by documentary filmmaker Sergei Dvortsevoy concerns the efforts of Asa, a nomadic sheep herder, to court the painfully shy, ostensibly beautiful teen daughter of the nearest living family. (Though we never see Tulpan’s face or figure, we do know her opinion: Asa has “big ears.”) Meanwhile, there is tension at home between Asa and his brother-in-law Ondas, who struggles with his family to eke out a subsistence amid harsh weather and a mysterious plague that is killing newborn lambs. But don’t go thinking this is a bleak film about an exotic, forbidding place: Dvortsevoy’s portrait of life on the steppe is poignant, bittersweet, and almost riotously funny. Asa’s goofy, pop-music-obsessed pal, who drives a converted tractor plastered in girlie-mag porn, never tires of hearing Boney M’s “Rivers of Babylon” blasted at top volume. And while Ondas’s preteen daughter irritates him with her open-throated folk singing, his constantly revved-up toddler son is a maniacal, wind-up screech machine with some of the best lines (mostly unscripted) in the film. (“I’m a monster!” he bellows, ripping into the center frame via yurt flap at a particularly tense moment.) Yet it’s the nonhuman element that makes this hinterland Kazakh drama such a unique and diverting delight. Ever-present on the soundtrack are wind squalls, ferocious dust storms, and a deafening symphony of bleats, honks, grunts, howls, and other unidentifiable outbursts courtesy of the camels and sheep with whom the family, played by a game cast of nonprofessionals, cohabitates. These beasts aren’t cute and preternaturally inquisitive, as they would be in a Disney film; they’re animals, and act like it.
When it comes to people, Dvortsevoy may traffic in comical grotesques, such as Tulpan’s disapproving, babushka-like mother, but he also has a documentarian’s eye for capturing unreproducible moments (e.g. in one sequence, a dust devil thrashes the landscape, tens of meters from the actors), as well as a naturalist’s sense of the sublime (an ominous band of storm clouds gathering above a gristle-munching, snow-white mutt). He captures it all with whip pans and elaborate handheld camera movements, tracking his actors through their paces in a way that suggests the chaotic urgency of their existence. Though Tulpan deals with unfulfilled longing, family tension, and the yawning abyss between city lifestyles and the hardships of surviving the steppe, perhaps the film’s true subject is the antithesis of man and nature, and its once-viable resolution in pre-agrarian society with the symbiosis between human and animal needs. When Asa assists a helplessly pregnant ewe at the emotional climax of the film, this on-camera live birth feels at once like an intoxicating revelation—and a paean to a vanished time we’ve lost all meaningful connection to, at least in the developed world, perhaps forever--DAMON SMITH
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME-
Each September, as the New York Film Festival rolls out two weeks of film for its illustrious guests and patrons, the event stirs up mixed feelings among this city’s hardcore cinephile community. Veteran malcontents like to grouse that there is too much middlebrow programming from the likes of Wes Anderson or Noah Baumbach, with top slots taken by crowd pleasers already slated for theatrical release. Others seem to think the fest is redundant, as it focuses on programming a best-of selection of already anointed or buzzed-about films from Cannes and Toronto. But these gripes are akin to drunken holiday invectives hurled at dearly loved family members. Sober up, people!
Now in its 46th edition, this year’s New York Film Festival corrals twenty-eight features and seventeen shorts representing a broad swath of international cinema into its posh new Ziegfeld Theater, from eagerly awaited new work by indie directors Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy), Hong Sang-soo (Night and Day) and Lucretia Martel (The Headless Woman) to celeb-studded dramas by Clint Eastwood (Changeling) and Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler), to masterly fables from the likes of Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale), Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours), and Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky). Alongside these are the festival’s equally distinguished sidebars, “Views from the Avant-Garde,” featuring new work by James Benning and a tribute to trailblazer Bruce Conner, and “In the Realm of Oshima,” a retrospective of the great Japanese provocateur Nagisa Oshima.
Far be it from me to spoonfeed such “unworthy” new and classic work to those who’d rather make discoveries of their own at far-flung festivals from Sarajevo to Pusan, but let’s be honest about something: who can afford to travel these days? New Yorkers have the good fortune of not having to road trip to Toronto (ten hours by car) or spend thousands of Euros only to wrestle red-carpet goons in a certain French resort town at the height of summer to see the best of what these major film showcases have to offer. Besides, this year’s selection committee—Kent Jones, Scott Foundas, Lisa Schwartzbaum, Jim Hoberman, and chair Richard Peña—have also included some nervy picks by newer filmmakers debuting at the fest (Antonio Campos, Pablo Larrain) as well as two astonishing, beautifully accomplished dramas, Tulpan and Shouga, both by Kazakh directors who should be better known to anyone serious about film culture.
As always, there’s plenty to see and argue about, and over the past two weeks of near-daily press screenings, that’s exactly what my colleagues have been doing. (Nothing’s as dull as consensus, or as useless for gaining insight into one’s own habits of viewing.) We’ve just begun to post our first round of on-camera interviews from the festival, as well as reviews and dispatches from our partner sites (Filmmaker, The Man Who Viewed Too Much, Filmlinc blog), so look here in the coming days for more coverage. And, as always, we invite you to join the conversation, whatever your entry point might be.--DAMON SMITH
EDITOR SCOTT MACAULAY AT TIFF- Filmmaker Magazine is the premier magazine for independent film. This year we are trading some of Scott Macaulay's inspired observations on the Toronto International Film Festival with some of our inspired video interviews. Good trade! Check back every day for new posts.
TORONTO: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
In the opening moments of Rod Lurie’s drama Nothing But the Truth, there’s an assassination attempt on the U.S. president and the government retaliates by bombing Caracas. In its final moments, the journalist who reported that the government knowingly went to war with the South American country on faulty intelligence meets her confidential source and.… Okay, I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s suffice to say that by the time we’ve reached the denouement of Lurie’s film this story of criminal foreign policy has shrunken to a depressingly conventional Hollywood tale of a mother’s idealism and sacrifice. (read the rest)
TORONTO: ROLLING SELL-OUTS AND VALENTINO
The best laid plans... despite arriving at what I thought was a suitably early time to catch the industry screening of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, the line halted just 20 or so people ahead of me. Whether it was the Venice win, the Fox Searchlight buy, or just the anticipation of a comeback for both Mickey Rourke and Aronofsky, The Wrestler was this afternoon's hot showing. (read the rest)
A few quick notes from Toronto and a couple of links before I go to bed. I'll write in slightly greater length about these films in the next few days.
By my fourth day here in Toronto, I've seen three films that I can wholeheartedly recommend: Steven McQueen's piercing, astringent near-masterpiece Hunger, which plays here in Toronto after debuting in Cannes; Astra Taylor's generous and affirming philosophy doc Examined Life; and Rahmin Bahrani's wise and well-observed Goodbye, Solo. (read the rest)
TORONTO QUICK TAKES: SAUNA
I always admire the blog writings of my colleagues who are able to jump from screening to keyboard, whipping out paragraphs of incisive critical prose. I tend to need more time to mull over the films I see as my opinions will shift from day to day. Take the first picture I saw in Toronto: Finish director Anti Jussi Annila's Sauna, which was shamelessly hyped in the program book to cine-geeks like myself as recalling both the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Eli Roth. (read the rest)
PARTY HOPPING IN TORONTO
Yesterday walking from one theater to another at the Varsity multiplex that houses the Toronto International Film Festival's Industry Screenings, I thought that things seemed a little quiet, missing the usual crowded hub-bub. No one seemed to agree with me, though. "This will be a rebound market," predicted one sales agent friend, who thought that a nice flurry of sales would materialize from the screenings this week. Another shrugged at my observation. "Everybody is here," he said. And later even I didn't agree with myself after I wound up at two very crowded parties filled with industry players. (read the rest)
GETTING INTO THE SWING OF TORONTO
What's with the media and indie film these days? I attend my first party in Toronto, eager to catch up with old film friends and see some new movies, but the toxic murk of today's business environment keeps seeping in. I got a ride in from the airport with a sales agent friend who, while bemoaning the difficult market for auteur films worldwide, said to me, "You have it worse in America. It's not that the films do any poorer there, but there's so much focus internationally on the American release that when they do fail everybody around the world notices." (read the rest)
OPENING DAY AT TORONTO 2008
Things seen and overheard, Day One of the Toronto International Film Festival:
Ads hyping the new hybrid Escalade are opening every screening of this year's Toronto Film Festival; whether that's a subconscious meta-commentary on the festival itself, a similar all-consuming mammoth that's uniting unwieldy pomp and flash with more down-to-earth concern, is entirely unknown. (read the rest)
Posted on 09/06/08 by:
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