Tueur À Gages (1998) (Killer)
Darezhan Omirbaev
Russian
A bleak and incisive social portrait of Kazakhstan following the fall of Soviet Union, Darezhan Omirbaev’s Killer (1998), on the outside, seems like a sudden detour from the director’s earlier works. Unlike the director’s previous three eloquent films, which respectively depicted a boy’s life in Kazakhstan during his childhood, adolescent and preadolescent periods, the sociopolitical description of the country here is neither allegorized nor limited by personal experience. What surfaces is a string of vignettes – highly redolent of the best of Italian neorealism – whose nearly mathematical structure betrays a need on the part of the director to speak out, to be overtly political. In the film, a scientist speaks about the importance of demonstration over verification (Omirbaev himself is a mathematician turned film theorist turned filmmaker). Likewise, Omirbaev takes it upon himself to demonstrate the various forces at work on an individual and to illustrate how the often depoliticized idea known as fate is nothing but a set of sociopolitical equations grounded in causality. He uses recurrent imagery and situations to highlight this idea of being unable to escape these forces. Interestingly, the acting, editing and direction are all highly Bressonian, with the excesses of the melodramatic script being continuously siphoned off by the austerity of (the sporadically heavy-handed) realization and relegation of all sensational action to off screen space and ellipses. Although Killer is anti-Bressonian in the sense that it dispels the illusion of randomness of grace, the penultimate encounter and the inevitable ending of the film is as affecting and as spiritually charged as the finest of Bresson.
September 20, 2010 at 1:33 am
“What surfaces is a string of vignettes – highly redolent of the best of Italian neorealism – whose nearly mathematical structure betrays a need on the part of the director to speak out, to be overtly political.”
“Although Killer is anti-Bressonian in the sense that it dispels the illusion of randomness of grace, the penultimate encounter and the inevitable ending of the film is as affecting and as spiritually charged as the finest of Bresson.”
Both of these statements are most intriguing to me JAFB! And the Kazakhstan setting and the fact that Omirbayev has helmed “three other eloquent films” has again inspired me to conduct my own research. While your work and writing are uniformly exceptional, the service you perform for those unawares is simply remarkable.
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September 20, 2010 at 7:34 am
Thanks Sam. Do try to check out the previous films of Omirbaev, especially Kardiogramma and the short film July. You won’t be disappointed!
Cheers!
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September 20, 2010 at 9:17 am
[…] Once again that proponent of unheralded cinema, the fecund JAFB, has again brought a director into focus that is known by few: Darezhan Omirbaev, a Russian, who has helmed four memorable works thus far, including the lastest one, structured in vignettes: https://theseventhart.info/2010/09/19/ellipsis-12/ […]
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September 20, 2010 at 12:12 pm
JAFB,
I was very sorry to hear of your family’s loss. My condolences.
Stephen
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September 20, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Thank you very much, Stephen
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September 27, 2010 at 9:40 am
[…] Once again that proponent of unheralded cinema, the fecund JAFB, has again brought a director into focus that is known by few: Darezhan Omirbaev, a Russian, who has helmed four memorable works thus far, including the lastest one, structured in vignettes: https://theseventhart.info/2010/09/19/ellipsis-12/ […]
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