The Anonimul Film Festival included “Yellow Cat”, the most recent film by Adilkhan Yerzhanov, the most popular Kazakh filmmaker since Darezhan Omirbaev, in its competition this year. An inspired choice and a chance to encounter a singular artistic intelligence, which here seems to have rediscovered the full extent of its creative means. The story of a couple of people who refuse to let their heads hang low, “Yellow Cat” is a sample of unchained romanticism which, in a sweeping fictional gesture, has the pretension of showing us the possibility of innocence as a catch-all cure of the ails of this world.

The signs of sclerosis had invaded the cinema of Adilkhan Yerzhanov ever since he directed The Owners in 2014, meaning, many films ago. After finishing this title, two roads were laid out in front of Yerzhanov: the road of the plastician, who promised to guide him to the very heart of mannerism, and that of the tale spinner, who promised to reveal the dramas buried in the hidden corners of Kazakhstan. The tricky deal regarding this forking path seems to have been won by Yerzhanov – save for the moments in which he lost it – at a hair’s breadth, making great efforts to avoid affectation and the whiff of festival-fare cinema. From this point of view, his latest film, Yellow Cat, is emblematic, since it gives us a bit of everything, no holds barred. And it’s probably precisely why – since it doesn’t pull any breaks or show any signs of fear – this is the auteur’s finest work in the last couple of years.

Its first half-hour seems to bear the worst of omens. Yerzhanov is used to shoot a lot of footage, but to invent little, thus resulting in an oeuvre that is haunted by auteurist tics, by things that we seem to have already seen or heard before, by recognizable landscapes – the same arid surroundings of a village named Karatas – and by redundant moral dilemmas. The corrupt policeman, his incompetent aide, the village idiot – stand-in figures for hardly controllable injustices – are the basic figures of this human theater that plays out in misery, which puts on a show even in moments when none is expected. Yerzhanov doesn’t need many things to start working: interiors are a rare sight in his filmography, abandoned in favor of open skies and virgin steppes that are blown by the wind, which he shoots in a pure, harsh CinemaScope. A few people strewn around in an open space and a moral conflict worthy of the ancient tragedians: but is this enough for cinema? One thing is for sure, that in the depths of his heart, Yerzhanov bears similarities to a John Ford who has descended onto harsh terrains, from which he is trying to extract the oils of a small existentialist comedy, where the law must invariably lie in the hands of the powerful. But his gunslingers’ legs have turned to lead, and his array of horses and muskets has been replaced by old rusty Volgas and handguns that are accidentally unloading.

We already know all of this, especially from his previous effort, A Dark, Dark Man (2019). And that is what I also saw in the film’s first part. In short, in such moments we are facing a cinema that is void of any substance and is simply attracted by superfluous beauties, in which small gags are an obstacle to compositions that are much too rigorous, yet even so, it’s a zero-sum game. As if, for Yerzhanov, the clothing worn by his characters – a yellow, flowery shirt for Kermek (Azamat Nigmanov), and a vaporous blue dress for his soulmate, Eva (Kamila Nugmanova), to rhyme with the artifacts of their dusty environment – was much more important than what they wear on the insides of their skulls. In such moments, I felt that the Kazakh auteur’s fall from grace is irredeemable, and that his tableaus, of a Vermeer-like parlour, are simply useless as long as they are lacking in any sort of inner life. Well, nothing prepared me for what was to follow.

If there is a type of auteur cinema that nowadays should first and foremost make us feel passionate about it, then it is the kind that is capable of shaking off its scaly skin and to imperceptibly offer us a whole new world. Just look at this film which, through a sleight of hand in its scriptwriting, leads us from the midst of the cruelest cynicism to the bright dawn of the purest innocence. A perfect occasion to remember that Yerzhanov is the kind of filmmaker who seems to have landed in this world purely by accident, spending his time by testing its possible alternatives and rummaging throughout the garbage that it produces, in the search of profane miracles. As it is, in his intimate cinematheque, his champions would be both the gods of western movies and Chaplin, the illustrious big-hearted vagabond.

Kermek is a simple man, humiliated by everyone. He is asked to dig a grave, and he digs it without protesting, without even taking a look at the strange cadaver which is eventually thrown inside. He is told to catch a man who is in debt, a nuisance to the local kingpin, and he immediately does as he is told. But everything changes once he meets Eva, a prostitute to whom, in a thoughtless gesture, he proposes the idea of building a cinema together, and the girl accepts. It’s the moment in which Kermek’s world starts to be, as they say, inhabited on the inside. This is the way innocence finds its way into the world – when in the most soulless of bodies, the spark of the lost inner child starts to shine. The two are thus setting off on a splendid cavalcade far from this world, which has less of a Bonnie & Clyde allure than it has a Taxi Driver one: their powers are almost divine. It sounds like a déjà-vu, and, in a way, this is the way it should be, since Yerzhanov’s world arrives to us not in a pure form, but rather,  under one that has passed through the acidic digestion of cinephile memory, reducing it to a sort of ABC of glorious gestures. When he dances, our main man seems to have jumped out of a Gene Kelly film, and when he wields a pistol, out of a Jean-Pierre Melville one. Yerzhanov doesn’t capture the world as it is, but rather, as the way cinephiles remember it at the end of a night of binge watching.

After Yerzhanov gave signs, in films such as The Plague at Karatas Village (2016), that he is the most allusive filmmaker one can be, inventing a substitute gag for every existential spasm out there, now, the Kazakh director seems to have arrived to a place where there is no more reason to hide. The cynicism of society, which hungrily devours all of the idealisms that keep people up and running and switches them with corruption (in a both administrative and metaphysical sense), is the eternal avowed enemy of this auteur’s vision. The trouble is that, oftentimes, the line between denouncement and complicity was much too fine, and the director ended up contaminated by the very same virus that he was claiming to fight against. This is not the case here, when the antidote is much too potent: never have I seen in Yerzhanov’s work a more ardent affirmation of the belief in utopia. There is a fabulous scene, worthy of the burlesque of the olden era, where Kermek sets a table against a wall onto which a bottle of wine and two glasses have been drawn, then sets out to “pour”, “toast” and “taste” in the presence of his lover: the gestures are in their right place, the only thing left is to believe in them. Kermek becomes emancipated from the simple status of a straw man, becoming a character of integrity, capable of bursting through the barriers of fiction and of building his own reality from scratch. Sometimes you don’t need anything else for a film to finally achieve its moment of grace.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.