Harmony Lessons

I saw this film at the Berlinale film festival 2013, as part of the official Competition. It was nominated for the Golden Bear. It won a Silver Bear for the camera work. New director Emir Baigazin of Kazakhstan makes his debut with this film. His potential has been noted, as he won several other prizes later on. My own overall impression, regardless of all pros and cons outlined below, concurs that this director shows promise.

I got stuck with mixed feelings during the screening. On the positive side, it showcased several present-day topics, like youth gangs and bullying within schools. Though having seen issues along this line many times before, this film twists these in a original way. Apart from that, given the school environment we see a lot of young actors, most of them performing splendidly and acting very believably, though presumably no professional actors.

On the negative side, this film could have been so much better when relevant clues were not left out. I missed some logic in the story line as it developed. Bullying combined with collecting money, clothes or other possessions from fellow students, is apparently an important theme in the story. It confused me to learn that different groups were doing this with very different reasons, one needing money to support people in prison, others purely for their own purposes. I would not be surprised when I'd missed something obvious, but anyway it confused me all the time.

Aforementioned original twist is that several uncomfortable scenes are included for the sole purpose of demonstrating a hierarchy in tormentors and victims, the latter becoming tormentors themselves when they get the chance or when required to support their existence. I nevertheless think that torturing cockroaches by our main character, being the obvious victim within the core story, is not something we necessarily need to witness. It could better be implied rather than showing this twice in a row, as such not a nice thing to do to us viewers. That another scene shows the cockroaches being hung as food for the lizards, is less bad and fitting in Darwin's theories about survival of the fittest (eat, or get eaten) that we see taught in class. All of this has an obvious meaning, given the context at hand. Less relevant was the electroshock torture on cockroaches in still an other scene, somewhat overdoing in demonstrating (again) the always existing hierarchy that is fundamental to how living species co-exist.

The scenes in the police station show a more "official" sort of violence. The police has got 48 hours to obtain a confession, and are very sure that they have the guilty (at least one of them) in their hands. But none of the two arrestees gives in, even when told halfway the proceedings that they have a written statement of the other one, and that alone suffices to bring the case in court. Stubbornly, they deny everything, even after severe physical pressure that gets heavier when time passes. Inconsequentially, our main character seems to have no problems with the unhygienic conditions in his prison cell, very unlike his former extravagant cling to hygiene, caused by an uncomfortable incident during a medical examination.

By the way: Some reviewers seem impressed by how Aslan catches, kills and skins a sheep, shown in the opening scene. On a farm as the one where he lives this is standard operating procedure and nothing out of the ordinary (I say this being grown up on a farm myself). It may be construed, however, to foreshadow the "eaten, or got eaten" hierarchy that appears later on as the recurring theme in this film.

All in all, I fail to make all heads and tails out of the narrative and the implied points that the film makers try to make. Believable casting and acting compensate for a lot of missing items in the story, where important clues seem left out. In addition, I cannot fully explain why I myself felt to be kept on a distance; for some reason preventing us from getting emotionally involved with the main characters. Last but not least, be prepared for a few uncomfortable scenes, where you rather want to look the other way, and some of them a bit over-the-top emphasizing the issue that we already grasped. Yet, a promising debut of this new director from a country that we don't recognize as producing many films with prize winning potential.