Rooted in unpretentious pastoral rhythms, “Black Red Yellow” from veteran Kyrgyz writer-director Aktan Arym Kubat gently weaves a peaceful 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 simple, serene clarity that indirectly recalls the films of Edward Yang and Yasujiro Ozu. Often erring on the side of excessive stillness and silence, “Black Red Yellow” — Kyrgyzstan’s entry at this year’s Oscars — doesn’t quite find its emotional balance in its compact running time.
Yet there is something interesting about the window that Kubat opens onto the community represented and all the people who contribute to it in the best possible way. The time period is not exactly defined, but there are clear signs that we are in the 1990s, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union which gave Kyrgyzstan its sovereignty. This is a period of transition that has proven difficult for the villagers. Unemployed men drink excessively, while women ungratefully attempt to keep everyone’s lives afloat by cooking, cleaning, and raising their children.
But despite its relative rarity, traditional carpet weaving continues in the village and is a lifeline in more ways than one. For the talented Turdugul (an expressive Nargiza Mamatkulova), the film’s central figure and sole weaver, carefully weaving rugs is both a means of livelihood and a kind of spiritual duty as she tends to the knots, threads, and colors of the rugs she patiently makes. The key colors of his designs give the film its title, while also showcasing the film’s dark chapters. Although a brief synopsis released for the film festival summarizes the colors in the way they symbolize human nature through calm, intensity, and nostalgic melancholy, the film itself doesn’t quite echo this tonal progression—without distinct ebbs and flows, the whole thing is dispassionate almost to a fault.
Via a framing device and a flashback remembered by an old woman, we arrive at the village with Turdugul, hired to weave a carpet for the unhappy couple Shirin (Aigul Busurmankulova) and Kadyr (Mirlan Abdykalykov). The couple’s story is not unique and therefore represents the difficulties of the region at that time – two people in an arranged marriage, increasingly dissatisfied with the harsh realities of life. More concerned with his horse than his house, Kadyr is often drunk and absent. Feeling excluded and trapped, Shirin, for her part, goes through various emotional crises, aggravated by the fact that pregnancy eludes her, despite her intense desire to become a mother.
Even though Busurmankulova feels deeply about this role (and happens to be the film’s most memorable performer), the story’s treatment of Shirin seems unfortunate in some ways. Practical, but fittingly angry and heartbreakingly suicidal, she doesn’t elicit much sympathy in “Black Red Yellow,” instead depicted as a stubborn, clichéd wife who doesn’t understand the depths of her sensitive husband. An example of this is given early on with Shirin’s first outburst, when Kadyr heroically saves a goat from drowning and hands it over 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 is probably lying? Well, she’s not wrong, not in their circumstances, even if the film goes out of its way to convince us of her shaky moral judgment. It’s almost as if its annoying qualities are designed solely to sell us the budding romance between Kadyr and Turdugul, who quickly fall for each other without any on-screen chemistry or narrative setup. Banned or not, romantic love is the easiest thing to encourage in cinema if it’s depicted with a palpable undercurrent of desire, which is rare here.
More compelling in the film is cinematographer Talant Akynbekov’s almost ceremonious observation of carpet weaving, as well as the rhythms of daily life, sometimes accompanied by the traditional tunes hummed by villagers. Women’s hands dance across the frame as they embrace the colorful threads before them or bake fresh bread in wood-fired stone ovens, while the men carry out arduous work against a majestic backdrop of mountains and valleys. Elsewhere, a photographer periodically captures singular family portraits, each telling their own silent story.
The film’s most powerful scene arrives when Turdugul’s grandmother refuses to sell her property to routine opportunists and laments the disappearance of a village beyond her control – an occasion that Akynbekov and Kubat approach with an understated documentary aesthetic. In search of work in big cities, entire families left the grandmother’s neighborhood and the responsibility for maintaining these houses, ventilating them when necessary, fell on her in one way or another. “Who will take care of it after I leave?” » asks the tired old woman. It is a scene that highlights the nurturing properties of a sacrificial matriarchal attitude that places survival and longevity ahead of the petty issues that define patriarchal destructiveness. (In fact, this feminine position makes Shirin’s questionable treatment in the story all the more confusing.)
After the principled Turdugul refuses Kadyr, “Black Red Yellow” ends quite satisfactorily on the heels of a brief third chapter. Unfortunately, the film leaves many hidden depths unexplored in the lives of Shirin and Turdugul, two women burdened by circumstances and sharing a sense of duty.
