Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
A Kazakh "Rebel Without a Cause"; a ruthless mockumentary about a mail-order bride; and the sleeper documentary hit "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill."
Mar 17, 2005 | "Schizo": Meet the James Dean of Central Asia
If you can imagine "Rebel Without a Cause" transported to the desolate Central Asian steppes of the former Soviet Union, that movie would be "Schizo," the impressive debut feature from Kazakh director Guka Omarova. This is probably the first film from Kazakhstan to get anything like mainstream distribution in the United States (and I know, regular readers, that this column has been specializing in these sorts of "firsts") but no history or geography is required. Although it's told in a more elliptical manner than your typical Hollywood actioner, "Schizo" is in its way a taut and exciting thriller, featuring gunplay and violence, a beautiful girl, a posse of ominous thugs and a Mercedes won in a midnight bare-knuckle boxing match.
It's also a tender and tough-minded coming-of-age tale, featuring 15-year-old Olzhas Nusuppaev (winner of the best actor award at the Tokyo Film Festival) as Mustafa, a teenager believed to have some kind of mental disability -- never specified -- that earns him the nickname Schizo. (In Russian, the language of urban Kazakhstan, it sounds like "SHEE-zah.") Nusuppaev is an orphan whom Omarova found working in a car repair shop in Almaty, the capital city of Kazakhstan, and it's easy to see why she was smitten. He's a gangly, beautiful boy with copper skin and unreadable eyes, and he broods through this film like a sullen angel, with something of the menace and vulnerability that made James Dean so magnetic.
Like most good movies, "Schizo" offers an almost archetypal tale. Badly in need of a father figure, Mustafa goes to work for his mom's charismatic leather-jacketed boyfriend (Eduard Tabyschev), who recruits unemployed local men to fight each other in late-night gladiatorial spectacles run by the mob. When a man who's suffered a lethal beating entrusts Mustafa with a wad of money to deliver to his beautiful girlfriend Zina (Olga Landina) -- and when Mustafa recruits his own uncle, a legendary rural tough guy, for one important bout -- the kid is inevitably dragged into a cycle of violence that can't have a good outcome.
Still, despite its dark human drama and the destitution it depicts in the Kazakh countryside, where men strip electrical wire off the poles to sell for scrap (since it hasn't carried a current in years), "Schizo" is a spectacular visual experience, and fundamentally a story of survival and even love. As director Omarova explains when I meet her in her New York hotel room on a sleety winter night (which seemed perfectly pleasant to her), the half-sexual, half-maternal relationship that develops between Mustafa and the older, more experienced Zina is not exactly true romance, but more like the affection that grows from mutual dependence, gratitude and trust.
On one hand, I was surprised that a movie that so ruthlessly depicts a boy's painful struggle to become a man had been directed by a woman. But on the other, as I say to Omarova, the film's hardheaded view of its central love affair, and its heartbreaking depiction of Mustafa's desire for family life -- he may care about Sanzhik, Zina's toddler son, at least as much as he does about her -- might reflect a distinctly female sensibility.
She laughs, describing the end of the film (which I won't divulge) as "really female stuff." But writing and directing a boy's story, she says, was just a matter of translating her own experience. "Basically, I think it was about myself. I was growing up with him too, with the character and also with the boy" -- here she smiles at Nusuppaev, who has crept almost silently into the room, wearing two rhinestone studs in his ears and and what look like brand new blue jeans. "My experience has also been about betrayal and friendship, people who abandoned me when I was a child," she says.
