A Film a Week - Dastur

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

A few years back, the Kazakh cinema was somewhat of a “flavour of the year” at the international film festival circuit. Most of the festival-goers would single out the name of Adilkhan Yerzhanov and his 2020 titles “The Yellow Cat” and “Ulbolsyn”, further highlighting it with the fact that the filmmaker maintained the tempo of two films per year that played at major festivals. However, Yerzhanov is not the only auteur and the festival circuit is not the only option for the films from Kazakhstan to start their exposure.

The sophomore feature directed by Kuanysh Beisekov, “Dastur”, which we were lucky to catch at Grossmann’s Fantastic Wine and Film Festival in Ljutomer, Slovenia, started it public life with the domestic distribution at the very end of the last year. There it achieved an unimaginable success: its box office numbers surpassed those of the Hollywood heavy-hitters like the newest “Aquaman” and Michael Mann’s “Ferrari”. After that, it hit the other markets in Central Asia and Russia, and bookings at the international festivals ensued, where “Dastur” was usually marketed as piece of exotic curiosity.

Dastur starts like a satirical thriller-comedy, with a premise somewhat related to the one of Yerzhanov’s “Ulbolsyn”. It is set in a small town, basically a village where everybody knows everybody. Bolat is the privileged son of the land owner and the town’s most influential man Nursultan, and the son has the habit of using his father’s influence to get out of the trouble he caused. However, this time he outdid himself: he raped the high school graduate Diana (newcomer Nuray Beksultanova) just after her graduation ceremony.

Since her family already reported the act to the police, Nursultan cannot help Bolat in the conventional way by either threatening or buying off those whom his son wronged. The only way out for both of the families is a hastily planned wedding, with a deal brokered by the mayor in which Bolat’s family has to give a hefty dowry to Diana’s. Of course, she is far from happy to marry her rapist, but the patriarchal tradition (and “dastur” means “tradition” in Kazakh) would otherwise put the burden of shame on her, and not him. Shortly after the wedding, the tragic events start to happen in the village, mostly to the families of the newlyweds. Does Diana who fell ill shortly after the wedding has something to do with them?

One of the reasons “Dastur” fared so well at the domestic box office was the fact that the audience realized its satirical potential, aimed at the country’s flagrant problems like the corruption and the abuse of power. The references, such as the names of the people and the places, in the script written by Kazybek Orazbek and one of the actors Aldiyar Zhaparkhanov (playing Bolat here and repeating the collaboration with the filmmaker after his 2021 debut) are not at all subtle, but they hit their targets. Of course, it works one way for the domestic audiences and the other for the international ones, but it is not that hard to catch the screenwriters’ drift.

“Dastur” actually works pretty well in its opening half, happening before the wedding, and focused on satire of the “unsanitary” and unfair practices of the Kazakh society. In it, the viewer can clearly see certain echoes of Ulbolsyn, both topic- and style-wise, since Beisekov manages to nail the right amount of chaos in his storytelling to make the point he wants to. The cinematographer Azamat Dulatov, who also handles the editing together with Almaz Oljabay manages to capture it in appropriately contrasting tones of bleakness of the inhabitants’ perspectives and the kitschy shininess of the rituals to be performed. The acting of the combined team of non-professionals and trained actors like Adalbek Shalbayev (playing Nursultan here) also suits the purpose.

However, the turn to the genres of fantasy and horror in the second half reveals both the fact that there is a certain lack of “know-how” regarding the genre filmmaking in Kazakhstan, and that the genre itself is a very thin veil to cover Beisekov’s intentions in his vision. “Dastur” simply never gets and holds a grip as a horror, which is a shame, but as a social metaphor, it is pretty strong.