What’s
a little wealth redistribution between friends? You could also call it home
invasion, armed robbery, and hostage-taking, but that would be too honest.
Regardless, a group of old Kazakhstani friends will not be friends much longer
in Olga Korotko’s Bad Bad Winter,
which screens as part of the 2019 Queens World Film Festival.
Dinara
has returned to the provincial town of her school days to close out her
recently deceased grandmother’s cozy cottage. Since leaving to study medicine
in Astana, here fortunes have improved greatly and so have those of her
businessman father. In contrast, the prospects of her old classmates have
stayed as lousy as ever—or even gotten worse. Nevertheless, she is still
sufficiently interested in her old flame Marat to spend the night with him.
Regrettably,
Marat happens to spy her granny’s rather sizable untapped stash of cash, so he
returns the next day with his suspicious girlfriend Arai, and fellow
schoolmates Aibek and Sanzhar, who are facing a potential murder charge along
with Marat, if they cannot adequately grease the necessary official palms. Obviously,
they intend to steal that cash Dinara subsequently tucked away, but finding it
again will be trickier than Marat expected. For a while, everyone pretends this
a just a soiree for old friends, but they eventually acknowledge what it really
is: a home invasion. Of course, Dinara knew it all along. After all, she always
was the smartest one in class.
The
strange is-this-a-thriller-or-isn’t tone of film’s first thirty minutes or so
makes it hard to pigeonhole, but it is weirdly effective. Of course, it inevitably
becomes clear this is indeed a rather dark crime drama, at which point Dinara strips
away the pretenses and levels a withering moral judgment on her captors.
It
is too bad New York’s congressional delegation probably will not see Winter, because it depicts
redistributionist class-warfare as the thuggery it is. Frankly, Aibek’s threats
and justifications are uncomfortably similar to their own rhetoric. It is also
telling how Dinara’s “guests” berate her one minute for wearing frumpy old
clothes and then accuse her of lording her wealth over them.
This
is also a great example of a film helmed by a woman and powered by a formidable
female lead, but it is not likely to turn up in surveys women-driven filmmaking.
Regardless, Tolganay Talgat is absolutely riveting as Dinara. It is fiercely
intelligent performance that covers an awful lot of physical and psychological
ground. As the psychotic Aibek, Zhalgas Zhangazin exudes creepy malevolence.
There is something deeply unsettling about his violent sense of entitlement,
probably because it hits so close to home. Tair Magzumov manages to project an
extremely weird pathos as the remorseful junkie, Sanzhar, while Nurgul
Alpysbayeva further ratchets up the hothouse tension as the jealous Arai.
With
its confined setting and five principal characters, Winter has all the elements of the classic stage thriller. Korotko
marshals them all quite effectively, but there is also some subtle social
commentary (especially regarding the Kazakhstani justice system) woven in. Very
highly recommended, Bad Bad Winter screens
this Wednesday (3/27) during QWFF ’19.
