La tendre indifférence du monde

This Kazakh masterpiece is almost a 9. But a conscious decision to tell a melodrama while killing the drama almost completely makes this movie hard to connect with. Aesthetically and technicly I would rate it 10, without a shadow of a doubt. But the emotional detachment forced upon the story by the director maybe reffering to the movie's title "The Gentle Indifference of the World" - a quote from The Stranger of Albert Camus, a quote made in the movie by the two leading characters.

The movie uses aesthetic cross references, such as the paintings of Henri Rousseau, the most obvious representative of Naive art, whose pictures are shown in the film more than once, blending perfectly with the amazingly static camera used by Adilkhan Yerzhanov and the strong frame he enhance each scene with. His caracters are Naive, they are aware of their own naivity but keep on hoping they will prevail.

It's a difficult one to watch, because it chooses to be so very gentle, no matter how brutal the story is. And I personally wasn't always so very happy with that gentleness, though I do appreciate the art and mastery required to achieve it.

Following the premature death of her father, Saltanat is forced to trade in her idyllic life in the countryside for the city. In order to save her mother from prison, she has to find money to pay off the great family debt that her father left after dying. She is accompanied and protected on this trip by her friend Kuandyk. But Saltanat and Kuandyk rebel against that strange and unfair world, and they do so as in Camus's The Rebel: 'All the generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present'. The film's title comes from The Stranger - it is a quote from towards the end of Camus' novel, when the protagonist Meursault accepts his end with equanimity. The film is a beautiful materialization of the literature and philosophy of Albert Camus. Its characters are searching for meaning in a world which seems absurd to a certain human logic, human life being, simply, as white cotton flowers spread through the fields of Kazakhstan.

The little use of music and sporadic humour in Adilkhan Yerzhanov's dull drama aspiring to be energetic, The Gentle Indifference of the World, are all that I enjoyed. The tale of two countryside people moving to the city in search of hope for themselves is a cliche but director Yerzhanov carves it in a way that evokes a sense of merriment in the light of despair. One of these people is in a complicated situation more than the other, and that is the start of the conflict that The Gentle Indifference of the World probably boasts about. The colour scheme and the impressive sound mixing kept me up as I struggled to complete this slow-moving drama that is not exactly about not giving up but about losing your way in the city (filled with other people who only care about money) while trying to find yourself. It's a critique of the cityside where innocence either gets killed or gets transformed into evil. And there is not much need for you to put your head into this mess that is projected one frame at a time. TN.

(Watched and reviewed at its India premiere at the 20th MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.)