All the Rage

A look at Sally Potter's star-studded experiment "Rage" and Sergey Dvortsevoy's "Tulpan," now on DVD.

The Kazakh film “Tulpan” (2008) might have been as cheaply made as “Rage,” but it wouldn’t play well at all on a cell phone. Mainly, Sergey Dvortsevoy’s crafty, moving feature is a documentary of a contrived story — Dvortsevoy’s background is as a nonfiction filmmaker, and his saga of pining love and shepherd life on the vast Kazakh steppes owes almost everything to veracity. The antithesis of Potter’s movie on every level, “Tulpan” is built entirely of real weather, real action, real animals and real knowledge — we never see the titular object of desire, the peasant girl Tulpan, because our ardent herder-hero Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov) never does, either.

A Herzogian aesthetic is in control, and it’s a joy — as in the extended scene in which a veterinarian comes to visit the hero’s family’s stillbirth-plagued herd with a bandaged camel calf in his motorcycle’s sidecar and, remarkably, the calf’s irate mother following, pacing in the background and eventually trotting after the bike when it leaves. Dvortsevoy attains this kind of real-time absurdism in long takes that are unrehearsed and unplannable and wondrous. This takes over completely in what becomes the movie’s money shot: a long sequence in which Asa, challenged as a worthless herd-hand by his older brother-in-law, is stuck in the middle of a flat nowhere with a sheep struggling to give birth, and rises to the occasion to help, in just a few long, uncut takes and all by himself.

There is a measure of exoticism at work here, but we presume it — Dvortsevoy is a Kazakh himself, and he seems as stunned and fascinated by the landscape and giant dust devils and camel herds as we are. Who’s to say? If you made a film in Death Valley, should you be blamed for making the most of the desert and the fauna and whatever crazy people you find living there? (The flavor of “Tulpan” is such that a scene can play out spontaneously for several minutes before the camera refocuses on a three-year-old pretending that the very live tortoise he’s playing with is a toy car in the sand.) Luckily, Dvortsevoy also has Kuchinchirekov, whose open, guileless face more or less controls our attention in a tumult of stampeding animals, sandstorms and barrenness, even or especially when he’s mouth-resuscitating a lamb still wet from the womb.

“Rage” (Liberation Entertainment) and “Tulpan” (Zeitgeist Video) are now available on DVD.

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