In Chasing the Birds, Farukh (Dzhanik Faiziyev), a young boy gets a brutal education in medieval Uzbekistan. The boy wakes the town shouting that the almond trees are in bloom, and gets a sound beating for rousing the towns folk from their sleep. Farukh is pursued by Amandyra (Dilorom Kambarova) a young woman who has a crush on him, and wants to elope with him, but when she is forced to marry after he does not come for her, she is unwilling to leave her wealthy new husband for him. Much of the film happens in open fields and streams, with Farukh's flashbacks to the village and his mother who died at his birth. This is all too jumbled to follow any chronology, or even know when the boy is dreaming, daydreaming or remembering an actual event. The boy also lost his father to drink, and then the town folk take all of Farukh's remaining possessions to satisfy his father's debts. After leaving the village with only the clothes on their backs and their ingenuity, Farukh and his childhood pal Khabib find a young orphaned girl Gultcha, who tags along with them until she and Khabib fall in love. When Farukh is away, a member of nobility who has taken a fancy to the girl, has his hunters invade their camp and then he rapes her. The Bey then kills Khabib in an underwater knife fight, before battling with Farukh. Lots of color and flashbacks & dreams make it hard to follow this non linear mystical story of lost loves and abuse by bandits or landlords. The acting is pastoral, even simplistic and the subtitles are hard to read against the light background; but the visuals are spectacular, so the 87 minutes are not a total loss.
2 Reviews
Visionary
tonereef10 June 2011
Khamraev apparently took on this project the day before shooting was scheduled to begin but you'd never guess it, because Man Follows Birds is a genuinely heartfelt meditation on the romantic ideals of adolescence – freedom, love and friendship, art and imagination, beauty and transience, nature and the transcendental – as well as on class and power, social order and disorder, humanity and evil, and more, all filtered through the eyes of a boy growing up in a small village in Khorezm several centuries ago. Farukh is something of a budding mystic, prone to ecstatic, sorrowful visions of his mother (who died in childbirth) and open to the wonder and potential of life in a different, more intense way than his feudal society can contain. And so the film becomes a road movie, as he and a slightly older buddy set off to try and fend for themselves in a world that wasn't made for them. It's structured as a kind of fable of recurrence: for a long time the seasons seem to pivot around the cusp of winter and spring, and the human drama around the poles of internal joy and imposed violence, companionship and ultimate aloneness. Some have compared it to Andrei Rublev, but Khamraev brings a lighter and gentler, though equally melancholy, touch to his material: as fierce as some scenes are there's a tender lyricism to balance the darkness, as well as a looser, less determined and perfectionist feel to the cinematography, mise-en-scène and editing (often it's as if consciousness itself were being pursued, on the wing). And although the narrative has its symbolic and even ritualistic motifs, its scope isn't epic: the focus remains Farukh and his growing moral and spiritual awareness. For that, Khamraev was lucky to have Dzhanik Faiziyev, whose beatific face and slight frame transparently annunciate all the hopes and often dashed dreams of youth. Hard to imagine this timeless work being made today; that it came out of Soviet Uzbekistan feels like some kind of small miracle.
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