The story begins with a high school student Ruslan in love with a classmate Sveta. The object of sighing, in turn, dreams not to go with his father and stepmother to Canada, but to move to his grandmother in Moscow. Sveta sets Ruslan a condition - for 10 thousand dollars she will give him her innocence and three days of close relationship. Ruslan does not come up with anything smarter than to take money for Sveta from the uncle of his classmate Berik. In the course of the film it turns out that the young heroes are not so simple and naive as it may seem at first glance.
Russian cinema has two very unpleasant extremes in terms of positioning – it is either “expensively rich” in gilding and Kazakh “baroque”, or so cheap and squalid that it seems as if the film was shot by a bunch of hungry students in the break between couples on a television camera. The trailer and poster for the film “For Love” can be safely attributed to the second type of domestic cinema. The indistinctly told tab, an excess of curvature and clumsy gags in the commercial and the most minimalist, made as if in a graphical poster pre-installed on a mobile phone application, rather push away from the film than attract the audience’s attention.
Meanwhile, Goltsev managed to shoot a rather tolerable criminal comedy from the point of view of the plot, in which there was a place for grotesque, and black humor, and several unexpected twists that (oh, miracle!) do not contradict either logic or history.
As for humor, it, as it often happens, is uneven in Kazakh cinema, but there are several memorable jokes and gags in the film. Producer Farhat Abdraimov took the lion’s share of the fun present in the film, playing a criminal authority who has a love for apples, self-harm and jokes. The natural organics of one of the most popular actors of the country fell perfectly under the image created by Goltsev.
After a number of unsuccessful and overly grotesque images (in the films “Escape from the village: Operation Mahabbat” and “Racketeer 2”), Maxim Akbarov rehabilitates himself in the movie as a petty bandit-loser. He was especially successful with the monologue about The Last Boy Scout, and it’s a pity that the director didn’t use this feature in other scenes with this character.
But debutants Alisher Tultayev and Maria Koroleva against the background of Abdraimov and other actors looked frankly weak. There is a lack of experience with both the camera and the text. In some scenes, both literally spit out jagged text.
From a technical point of view, the picture also looks weak. The ragged editing makes For Love look like a sitcom episode rather than a full-length rental film, as well as a stingy camera job. It seems that the budget of the film was no more than the amount transferred from hand to hand the characters of the film. And a pity, the story itself turned out to be quite good and invest the creators a little more in technique and promotion.
The film could dilute a series of similar local comedies about another marriage.