SYDNEY CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL: One of the curious effects stemming from the proliferation of national-themed film festivals that dot the Australian cinematic calendar is that the filmmaker’s original intent is sometimes overtaken by our own perceptions and those associated with 'film festival’ culture. So it is with Yahefu Xirizhati’s Flower, a populist melodrama that plays like a folk culture-based soap opera despite the nods to authenticity and detail that may have some thinking it is a piece of regional realism. Put it this way: when a grandmother fakes an injury so the single local medical worker keeps visiting the family, thus repeatedly meeting her equally single granddaughter, you could as easily be on the Upper East Side of Manhattan as in China’s Xinjiang province.
'Life is full of twists and turns," sing a group of children at the start of this movie, and throughout the movie different characters sing the same song, focusing on those lines so they become a kind of theme. The life in question is that of Flower, who is born to her mother during a singing contest at a Kazakh cultural festival – her waters break during the performance of 12-year-old Kadeeran (Aghamati Hashan), a snot-nosed whelp who later ceremonially kisses the baby, thus setting off cosmic repercussions that play out with a mixture of sentimentality and narrative cruelty.
The infant Flower (Jianiya Jianati) is born to song yet unable to speak. As a five-year-old, raised by grandparents as tradition apparently dictates, she’s unable to speak despite many exhortations and some teasing. Playing the dombru, a kind of variation on the mandolin, gives her a means of expression, and it helps her through the death of her grandfather, the discovering of her voice (spoken and singing) and her transition into adulthood, where she is played with determined watchfulness by Ruzha Dawulet.
The filmmaker shows this world of vast rolling hills, where snow-capped mountains appear to hang above the horizon and horses are more common than cars, with a crisp visual palette, although Xirizhati is too fond of his crane, repeatedly using it to rise up in scenic contemplation or swoop down on a open topped yurt (portable building) to gaze inside at the singing and dancing; the aesthetic is a little too travel advert.
As a young woman Flower is a leading local 'arkin" (singer), complete with improvisational abilities and the skill required to win sheep. But she meets her match in the adult Kadeerhan (Dabul Heibat), who has a pop star’s swagger even when atop a horse. He sets out to woo Flower, and they have musical confrontations at various gatherings where a Bollywood influence has the boys and the girls on opposite sides of the yurt, cheering on their champions. Despite not knowing their earlier link, Kadeerhan should be everything Flower desires, but he wants to move away from the sparse, Chinese-controlled region and relocate eastwards, which would take her away from her grandmother.
There are certain actresses, less so now, who are defined by emotional torment. Like Joan Crawford, Ruzha Dawulet takes each blow with stoic despair. Flower not only loses Kadeerhan, but when she does marry her husband suffers a misfortune on a trip to the city to try and find dombru strings for her. But the film isn’t interested in the cultural significance of her struggles, or what it says about the Kazakhs living in China (as opposed to Kazakhstan), it’s a page turner adapted for the screen. The backdrops are striking, but the action in the foreground is somewhat formulaic.
