NYFF. Chouga.

"Tolstoy's Anna Karenina honed to a deadpan highlight reel, Darezhan Omirbayev's Chouga turns the epic melodrama of cross-country fidelity and infidelity into a languorous, essentialist series of almost-mysterious, always-fated romantic movements," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "The psychology so beloved by the novel is minimized down to looks in the film, major events and feelings like courtship and inner unrest rendered as minimally as a terse conversation on a couch and a brief look down, then away."

"A film devoid of frenzy, Chouga, inherits the same themes and devices of Dziga Vertov's great frenzy-film, Man with a Movie Camera, in which every shot is mediated, and the human eye and camera-eye are, for the most part, exchangeable." David Phelps in Slant: "For like Vertov's characters, Omirbaev's almost seem to operate as cogs in a systematized world."

"[N]ot even the talented and literary-minded Bernard Rose could make a worthwhile Karenina in 1997," notes Ed Champion. "Perhaps Anna Karenina is, like Don Quixote, not really intended to be adapted. And while the fates have tilted against those tilting at windmills (including Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam), they have kept a more laissez-faire with regard to this Tolstoy masterpiece. Filmmaker Darezhan Omirbaev, however, has no such qualms attempting to beat the rap with Shuga. With the deck firmly stacked against him, he tries to tackle Tolstoy in a mere 90 minutes, which is the creative equivalent of the All-England Summarize Proust Competition.... And I think it's safe to say that Omirbaev's film did not cut the mustard with me."

"At times, Chouga reminded me of Aki Kaurismäki's own deadpan Dostoyevsky adaptation, Crime and Punishment, both for its minimal aesthetic style and flat affect," writes Damon Smith for FilmCatcher. "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."

"Darezhan Omerbaev is apparently one of Kazakhstan's leading masters, which, granted, isn't a terribly helpful thing to say," notes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "Chouga is, in all probability, the most deadpan thing I've seen all year. I'm not sure why you need Tolstoy to make a deadpan comedy, but here it is anyway."

"Chouga manages to stay intriguing, in part because of unique choices - a sudden pan to the window sill, undue attention paid to a son's video game and the falling snow - and a luminous lead performance by Ainur Turgambaeva," finds Jürgen Fauth.

Update: "Omirbaev's distilled aesthetic - oneiric sequences that equally allude to internal conflict and creative impulse, disembodied framing of hands and feet that evoke Robert Bresson's cinema, and elliptical, de-dramatized action - proves especially suited in reflecting the sterility of the city's cultural transformation through the image of lavish, but idiosyncratically forbidding spaces represented by the cosmopolitan world of opera houses and luxury passenger trains," finds Acquarello.

Update, 10/17: "Cinema - its real and ersatz versions - is as much a subject of Chouga as are the tragedies and epiphanies of romantic love," writes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot. "Omirbaev does more than simply transpose Tolstoy's work from late 19th-century St Petersburg to early 21st-century Kazakhstan. Like his forebear, he employs the tragic dalliance between Anna and Vronsky (in this case, Chouga and Ablaï) to look deeply at the shallowness of the upper classes. But he does so... with an interest in modern Kazakhstan's newly consumerist society and particularly the visual culture on which it feeds."

Update, 10/25: "Chouga is a masterful distillation of the great novel's characterizations and themes," writes Eric Hynes for Stop Smiling. "In constant dialogue with the nineteenth century text yet immersed in the bourgeois urbanity of a post-Soviet society on the rise, Chouga shows how patriarchy persists in permitting male passions and is intolerant of women's."

Posted by dwhudson at October 15, 2008 9:33 AM