Desert Blue
Desert Blue (Iradi: Kök Chöl; Russian: Синяя пустыня) is a 1981 Soviet film directed by Beknur Karimov for Talasfilm Studios, his only Eastern, the Iradi variety of the Western begun by Desert Sun’s Rebellion (1979). A young woman separated from her father while chasing the family herd strays into the Karatau ranges, where she is set upon by the hill tribes. It was well received on release and was Karimov's one popular success, but later writers have criticized its portrayal of the Karatau tribes and its sexualized scenes of attempted sexual assault.[1]
Plot
In the 1920s a dust storm scatters a herding family's horses at the edge of the steppe. Aigerim (Gulnara Alimbekova, the Aisha of Desert Sun's Rebellion) and her father ride after them and lose each other in the storm. Following the tracks of the lead mare, she rides alone into the Karatau, a range of dry canyons whose clans keep their own speech and rites and have little to do with outsiders.
The people she meets there are shown as silent and menacing. Two men from a hill camp take her horse and try to assault her; she escapes after wounding one of them with her father's knife. Hunted through the canyons for two days, she kills a second pursuer in a struggle at a spring and buries him under stones before riding on. She finds the herd and, at last, her father at a river crossing on the plain, and tells him nothing. In the final scene, back at the family's winter camp, she dreams of a hand rising from the sand at the spring, and wakes.[1]
Reception
The film played widely in the Iradi SSR and drew good notices in the republican press, which praised its suspense, its desert photography and the lead performance; it was Karimov's most conventional work and the only one to find a large audience.[2]
Later assessments have been harsher. Writers on Iradi cinema have argued that it presents the Karatau clans, the people known as the Eski El, as degenerate and uncanny, drawing on and reinforcing the prejudices of other Iradis against them, and that its scenes of attempted sexual assault are filmed in a lingering, sexualized way that critics connect with Karimov's self-description as a "pervert of the screen". The film is seldom revived, and screenings at Talasfilm Archives retrospectives have been accompanied by introductions addressing these criticisms.[1]
References
- ^ Talas Journal of Cultural Studies (2023). 'Surrealism and the Nomadic Soul in Karimov's Cinema.' Vol. 11, Iss. 1, pp. 112–129.
- ^ Kino Iradistana (1981). Review of Desert Blue. No. 11, pp. 18–21. Talas.