Student, Darezhan Omirbayeb, Kazajistán, 2012

By Roger Koza

Everything starts almost as a joke —Omirbayev himself is filming a scene for a film. A pullback travelling angle on a very beautiful woman shows the shot is finished. “Cut,” says the director. A young assistant can’t stop staring at the leading actress. There will be an accident and a beating.

The true film —inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and contextualized in our times— is born out from that introduction. Kazakhstan is an unknown territory for us and in just a few minutes Omirbayev will introduce its unexpected modernity through its buildings.

And though the name of the student will not be revealed, the young main character wants to prove a thesis through a bizarre and controversial choice, a political suspension of ethics as it happened to the characters in Hitchcock’s The Rope; the student will end up killing two innocent people. This is a philosophical test.

And though this is not made explicit, the subject he studies at college is philosophy and those passages at university class rooms function as ideological coordinates. A capitalist version of Darwinism summarizes contemporary malaise and thus the presence of animals —a horse, lions, giraffes, hyenas, and doves all are starred. To see a giraffe kicking out as a defense against hungry lions summarizes the struggle between the weak and the strong. But curiously enough the power of this film lies not in its words, but in its images. In fact, a verbal economy is evident. However, that doesn’t mean the soundtrack functions poetically only; the sophistication of the work on the direct sound is admirable and the way silence bursts in at some key sequences is unforgettable.

How to film the process of a decision making, of achieving an understanding of things? The importance of the dream sequences and those fabulous and almost imperceptible cross fades has to do with that. Student ends with a direct quote taken from Bresson’s Pickpocket, another prominent adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s book; and the capitulation of the young student, an apparently dark end for him, turns into future hope. To surrender is to conquer the right to achieve grace.

Chouga, Darezhan Omirbayeb, Kazajistán-Francia, 2007

Omirbayev’s second full-length film features the child Zhalusan (Jasulan After dreaming of a boy fishing on a lake, a deliberately symbolic landscape and an oneiric material which will be repeated with a significant variation, Tléguen wakes up and he is no longer a little boy, but he is as lonely as he was in his dream. He cooks some breakfast, reads a poem, and goes out in search for some possible love. A fragment of the poem reads: “What do I do with words? What do I do with the vortex of my emotion?” The answer to this question is the film itself. It talks about the new social order in Kazakhstan, about the discreet but direct impact of it over the private lives of individuals, their families, and their economies.

At a dancehall, Tléguen waits for Altynai with a bouquet of flowers in his hands. The beautiful young lady is glad Tléguen remembered her birthday; but then appears Ablai, a possible boyfriend, a bit older than they are and also with a bouquet of flowers twice or even three times as big as Tleguen’s. Nothing or little is actually said, but everything is understood. This is poetics.

There are also the panoramic and subjective shots of modern architecture. A public space where in- vestment and material wealth are apparent and there are traces of a change. There is a street sequence where the iconic Parisian opening is the only deterrent for us to think we are in a street in downtown Almatý. And what is there to say about the interiors? The home conveys not only a style of life but a psychic space: a woman in a marital crisis stares from her window at a couple of newlyweds. Later on, three doors will be closed on their own at three different houses —the mysterious materialization of yearnings and frustrations.

This is an adaptation of Tolstoi’s Ana Karenina in another time and another space. “Ana” is Chouga, Altynai’s aunt, who will fall in love with Ablai and will leave her millionaire husband and even her small kid for him. The moments of seduction are extraordinary and even more so their first act of love (off screen, silly and glorious). Society may judge her based on gossip, but not so Omirbayev, who is too lucid to inflict punishments on his creatures.

About Love, Darezhan Omirbayeb, Kazajistán-Corea del sur, 2006