Tulpan has been showing up in small theaters around the US, and recently made a stop in quiet Bloomington, Indiana. I readily admit that I am not the movie’s target audience, as part of the appeal of setting a movie in such a remote area is the expectation that it will appear exotic and other-worldly. Having seen the Betpakdala for myself (Бетпақдала, known in Russian as the Northern Hunger Steppe, Северная Голодная Степь) , where the film is set, it would seem that I might be a little harder to please than the average movie goer.
That being said, I have to say that I enjoyed most of the movie, and would recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about Kazakhstan, however tangentially that would occur through watching this movie.
Tulpan’s plot centers on Asa, a young Kazakh man, and his efforts to fit into life on the steppe and his attempts to win the hand of the enigmatic Tulpan. The film is director Sergey Dvortsevoy‘s first non-documentary, and that shows more than a little bit. Known as the “live sheep birth film” at the film festivals where it won its awards and the earth-shattering praise of Ebert, the movie focuses as much on the wildlife as it does on the narrative of young Asa, recently returned from the Navy to apprentice as a shepherd with his brother-in-law.
The film excels in showcasing the bilingual nature of Kazakhstan. In other words, if one pays attention to when Asa speaks Russian, it is couched in very specific emotional settings. For example, when he is trying to impress Tulpan, or discussing the city with his friend Boni, or talking with his sister.
My main complaint, then, is the strangeness of the backstory that would create a Kazakh shepherd that is also a veteran of the Russian navy in the early 2000s. It’s clear that Asa did not grow up on the steppe, and is unable to do relatively simple tasks. His work is often done again by his brother-in-law, or worse, by his pre-pubescent nephew. My question is why the director/writer decides that Asa is from Sakhalinsk in Russia, and not a relative coming from the city.
It isn’t necessary to explain why a Kazakh would know Russian, in my opinion, especially one that comes from the city or has served in the military. While Dvortsevoy is from Kazakhstan, he went to film school in Moscow and perhaps his perception of the continued connections between Russia and Kazakhstan led him to place Asa in the Pacific Fleet far away from land-locked Kazakhstan. I personally have no idea, but the Soviet Union ended in 1991. While that might not mean terribly much, it did pretty much end the yearly exodus of teenage men from the various Union Republics to the farthest flung corners of the СССР.
All in all, the film is similar to other pseudo-documentaries to come out of Central Asia, like The Story of the Weeping Camel. The characters are often stereotyped to the point of one-dimensionality, and the only person that grows during the film is young Asa. The live birth sequence is everything you think it is, but for someone who has seen his fair share of birth, it is more a gimmick than anything else, playing on the distance from the land of most Western movie-goers. This, more than anything else, might explain the movie’s lack of appeal to rural Kazakhs in Kazakhstan. They probably don’t want to go to the theater to see their own jobs represented, and they probably could tell us just how inept Asa is as an apprentice shepherd. For a movie that reportedly took four years to make, it is obviously a labor of love, but one that perhaps left some room for improvement. That being said, I will gladly go see the next Dvortsevoy offering.
This post was written by...
Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 158 posts on Registan.net.
Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.
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i enjoyed the film’s strange low-key sense of humor. plus the cinematography was beautiful.
a lot of your critiques of the film never occurred to me at all. i guess knowing less about that region of kazakhstan worked to my benefit. for what it’s worth, my post about the film from last april is here