“Kirgizfilm” is not at all a backyard of the Soviet film industry, which, however, can be said about other Central Asian studios of its time. This is an integral part of Soviet cinema, whose distinguishing feature is not the notorious colonial style, annoyingly manifested in the so-called Westerns of the 1970s and 80s, but sometimes an extremely interesting combination of local texture with global trends. At this studio worked a variety of directors, not necessarily autochthons. Suffice it to recall Larisa Shepitko with her debut “Water”, and Konchalovsky with the already famous “First Teacher”. But this is Bolotbek Shamshiev, who directed a number of beautiful films, as perhaps the best example of homegrown film poetry of all-Union significance.
“White Mountains” (otherwise “Difficult crossing”) is the directorial debut of Melis Ubukeev, whose filmography is extremely small (four films in total). But it's a very successful debut. True, when at the beginning of the film we find a verbal introduction about the “blazing turning years”, and expect that you will immediately move from the screen red commissars, white officers, green basmachi and yellow barchans (such an aberration is explained by the habit of Eastern language), but the film develops quite differently. Of course, both commissioners and officers are present in a certain proportion, because without an ideological tithe, films on a historical theme could not appear then, but Ubukeev filmed, in essence, a chamber drama about a young boy who intuitively passes (literally and figuratively) on the side of the “reds”, but the unwanted persecution forces him to hide in a yurt with one family, where a significant acquaintance with a beautiful girl, who has long been promised as a wife to the local fat sum. However, one, and I want to say, a magical night destroys all plans, breaking the local history in the direction of the Big Time.
Ubukeev clearly knows not only Soviet, but also world film aesthetics. Perhaps most of all, the style of his film gravitates to poetic cinema. The river, which, on the one hand, carries a weak-willed chip, and the same river, which is bravely stormed by the local Romeo and Juliet, obeying their pressure, however, with a sad outcome for the main character, is understandably not just a mountain river, but an image of time in which the logic of the fatal gives way to the intention of ideological choice. Yurt, in which and in the vicinity of which almost all the action of this short ribbon takes place, is not isolated, but topos inscribed in space, in which both the steppe and the mountains also act as signs of a world that seems to have existed unshakably in its contours for more than one century, but in fact is already destined for great changes. Even the heroes themselves with their quite unambiguous “ideological” coloring (which can not be said about all, it is enough to recall the amazing episodic figure of the jester) are not resolved straightforwardly. The director does not care at all about the foregoneness of tendentious conclusions. He is clearly fascinated by the hyperimage of the space in which the protagonists begin to draw their own routes, descending from beaten roads, contradiction and geography, and the almost mythological state of morals.
In other words, it is a thin, atmospheric film, thematically tied to the ideological conjuncture of its time, but having great cinematic value as a very non-standard sample of a film on a very standard theme.
7 out of 10