According To The variety Rooted in unassuming pastoral rhythms, veteran Kyrgyz writer-director Aktan Arym Kubat’s “Black Red Yellow” gently weaves a placid story of love and tradition around a proud Kyrgyz village that has seen better days. Co-written by Topchugul Shaidullayeva, the delicate drama channels a kind of unfussy and serene clarity that obliquely brings to mind the films of Edward Yang and Yasujiro Ozu. Often erring on the side of excessive stillness and silence, “Black Red Yellow” — this year’s Academy Awards submission from Kyrgyzstan — doesn’t quite find its emotional footing within its compact running time. Still, there is something worthwhile about the window Kubat opens into the community depicted and all the people who contribute to it in the best way they can. The time period isn’t exactly defined, but there are clear signs that we are sometime in the 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union that earned Kyrgyzstan its sovereignty. It’s a transitional period that has proven hard on the villagers. Out-of-work men drink excessively, while women thanklessly try to keep everyone’s lives afloat through cooking, cleaning and raising children. But despite relative scarcity, traditional carpet weaving endures in the village as a lifeline in more ways than one. For the talented Turdugul (an expressive Nargiza Mamatkulova), the film’s central figure and sole weaver, attentively weaving rugs is both a livelihood and a spiritual duty of sorts as she tends to the knots, threads and the colors of the carpets she patiently makes. The key colors of her creations lend the film its title, while also headlining the movie’s obscure chapters. Although a brief synopsis published for the film’s festival run summarizes the colors in the way they symbolize human nature across calmness, intensity and nostalgic melancholy, the film itself doesn’t quite echo this tonal progression — without any distinct ebbs and flows, the whole thing is even-handed almost to a fault. Via a framing device and flashback remembered by an old woman, we arrive at the village with Turdugul, hired to weave a carpet for the unhappily married couple Shirin (Aigul Busurmankulova) and Kadyr (Mirlan Abdykalykov). The couple’s story isn’t unique, and thus, it represents the region’s hardships in that era — two people in an arranged marriage, increasingly unfulfilled by life’s harsh realities. Concerned more about his horse than his home, Kadyr is often drunk and absent. Feeling left out and trapped, Shirin, on the other hand, goes through various emotional outbursts, worsened by the fact that pregnancy eludes her, despite her intense desire to become a mother. While Busurmankulova is deeply committed to the part (and happens to be the most memorable performer in the film), the story’s treatment of Shirin feels unfortunate in some regard. Practical, but rightfully angry and heartbreakingly suicidal, she doesn’t get a lot of sympathy in “Black Red Yellow,” instead represented as a clichéd nagging woman who doesn’t understand the depths of her sensitive husband. An example of this emerges right at the start with Shirin’s first outburst, when Kadyr heroically rescues a goat from drowning and hands it to an old man who claims to be its owner.
Why didn’t Kadyr just keep the goat instead of giving it to someone who’s probably lying? Well, she’s not wrong, not under their circumstances, even though the film goes out of its way to convince us of her shaky moral judgment. It’s almost as if her pesky qualities were conceived only to sell us on the burgeoning romance between Kadyr and Turdugul, who quickly fall for each other without any on-screen chemistry or narrative setup. Forbidden or not, romantic love is the easiest thing to root for in cinema if it’s portrayed with some palpable undercurrent of desire, which is in short supply here.
More convincing in the film is cinematographer Talant Akynbekov’s observant, almost ceremonious lensing of carpet weaving, as well as of the beats of everyday life, sometimes accompanied by the traditional tunes villagers hum. Women’s hands dance across the frame as they embrace the colorful threads in front of them or make fresh bread in wood-burning stone ovens, while men bear heavy-duty labor with the majestic backdrop of mountains and valleys. Elsewhere, a photographer periodically captures idiosyncratic family portraits, with each one telling its own silent story.
The film’s most powerful scene arrives when Turdugul’s grandmother refuses to sell her property to routine opportunists and laments about a vanishing village that has been slipping through her fingers — an occasion Akynbekov and Kubat approach with an unobtrusive, documentarian aesthetic. Looking for work in big cities, entire families have left the grandma’s neighborhood and the responsibility of maintaining those houses, airing them out when needed, somehow fell onto her. “Who’s going to take this on after I’m gone?” the tired old woman wonders. It’s a scene that underscores the nurturing properties of a sacrificing matriarchal attitude that puts survival and longevity over petty matters that define patriarchal destructiveness. (In fact, this feminine stance makes the story’s questionable treatment of Shirin all the more puzzling.)
After the principled Turdugul turns down Kadyr, “Black Red Yellow” comes to a satisfying enough close on the heels of a brief third chapter. Sadly, the film leaves a lot of hidden depths unexplored in the lives of both Shirin and Turdugul, as two women burdened by circumstance and a shared sense of duty.