|As rendered in “Schizo,” Guka Omarova’s tough and tender first feature, the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan is a flat, barren landscape of tall, yellowish grass punctuated by heaps of coal slag and empty train depots. It is a desolate, half-abandoned place, but one that nonetheless has a harsh, austere beauty.
Omarova’s film, a coming-of-age story that is sensitive and well observed – if also somewhat conventional – takes in the features of the terrain and absorbs both its grimness and its grace.
The main character is a 15-year-old boy named Mustafa (Olzhas Nusuppaev), who lives with his mother and her boyfriend, Sakura (Eduard Tabyschev), a charismatic small-time criminal whom the boy worships like a paternal demigod. Cruelly nicknamed Schizo by his classmates, Mustafa seems more slow-witted than mentally disturbed, but his mother worries enough about his condition to start saving up to take him to a specialist in Almaty.
Meanwhile, the boy follows Sakura around and helps him arrange illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches supervised by a local gangster. As one of the fighters lies dying on a concrete floor after an especially vicious bout, Mustafa agrees to take the man’s meager share of the purse to his wife, Zinka (Olga Landina), who lives in a rickety shack on the edge of town with her young son. Schizo and Zinka strike up a tentative, improbable romance, and her son looks up to Schizo much in the way Schizo looks up to Sakura.
The moral and emotional predicaments that Schizo faces are not hard to see coming, and the film’s story bears some resemblance to Ken Loach’s “Sweet Sixteen,” about a young boy mixed up with Glasgow drug dealers. Omarova, a prot g of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov (who collaborated with her on the script for “Schizo,” as well as serving as a producer), is a clear-sighted, self-confident filmmaker with an ability to blend the slow, detached rhythms of the classic landscape film with the verve and violence of a gritty crime story. She has a painter’s eye for composition and a novelist’s sense of character.
The impoverished world that Schizo inhabits is governed by greed, petty corruption and desperation. Unemployed men risk their lives in the boxing ring, the local doctor accepts bribes in the form of pickles and sour cream from poor patients and Schizo’s drunken, deadbeat uncle ekes out a living stripping wires from utility poles.
Yet the people in this dog-eat-dog environment retain their dignity in spite of their hard circumstances. Landina, with reddish-blond hair and a spray of freckles across her face, looks like Sissy Spacek’s long-lost Kazakh cousin; Omarova captures her loveliness without making her look too pretty and emphasizes her poverty without stooping to pity or exploitation.
“Schizo” is, in the end, a movie about its hero’s discovery of his ability to feel pride and to take responsibility, and it is also, fittingly, a proud and responsible film.
***
“Schizo”
NOT RATED|1 hour, 26 minutes|DRAMA|Directed by Guka Omarova; written by Omarova and Sergei Bodrov; in Russian with English subtitles; photography by Khasanbek Kydyraliyev; starring Olzhas Nusuppaev, Eduard Tabyschev, Olga Landina, Bakhytbek Baymukhanbetov, Soukhorukov, Gulnara Jeralieva, Kanagat Nurtay|Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.