There is something special about a movie that comes absolutely out of nowhere and gets released against all odds. “Schizo” is one of those, and it’s a good one.
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“Schizo” – 3 stars Realistic: A coming-of-age picture from Kazakhstan, about a 15-year-old kid involving in illegal boxing, and his sudden sense of responsibility for somebody else. (In Kazakh, with English subtitles.) Rated: Not rated; probably R for violence. Now showing: Varsity. |
A first-time director from Kazakhstan, Guka Omarova, created this coming-of-age picture. Now, it is practically a requirement of new directors that they make a coming-of-age movie, but Omarova comes up with some striking new wrinkles.
The story is set in a ratty corner of Kazakhstan in the early 1990s. Our protagonist is a 15-year-old boy named Mustafa, but nicknamed “Schizo” for what is perceived as his peculiar behavior (although, given the way everybody else behaves, you can hardly blame him for being odd). He is played by a believable kid cast from an orphanage, Oldzhas Nusupbayev.
His mother’s shifty boyfriend gets Schizo involved in recruiting desperate, unemployed men to participate in illegal fistfights. After one such bloody brawl, a fighter hands Schizo his prize money, asks him to take it to his girlfriend, and promptly dies.
For the first time, Schizo feels responsible for something – namely providing for the girlfriend, and for the dead man’s tiny son, who live in a shack at the edge of town. Unfortunately this means Schizo relies even more on finding money through the underworld, which leads at first to a wonderful episode involving his eccentric, hard-drinking uncle, but later to trouble.
Omarova’s treatment of this story gets all the grit of the situation – it seems to take place in real places, with real people (most of the actors were non-professionals). When you see a big flea market in an open field, it looks like the real thing caught on the fly, and probably is.
But the director has a touch of the poetic, too, which the grim subject needs; a close-up of crummy toys on a metal chair suddenly makes you feel you’ve glimpsed an entire sad childhood.
She looks like a real discovery, for which some credit should go to her producer and co-writer, Russian director Sergei Bodrov (who directed the Oscar-nominated “Prisoner of the Mountains”). It’s amazing that Omarova’s movie got international distribution. I wonder if we’ll ever hear from her again.
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