In the snow, there was a dying mother, kneeling beside her father, holding her infant brother, frightened and helpless. The little girl turned around, walked with difficulty into the snow, and knelt down: Allah, I will use my twenty years of life to pray that my mother will not die. This is the third time in the film that the girl kneels down and asks Allah. The film came to an abrupt end.
This scene is the last scene of the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival Golden Goblet Award for Best Film, and Kazakhstani director Daniyar Salamat presented the audience with the film "Divorce". The film is like a deep and delicate picture of a rural nomadic society, desolate and heavy, bringing the audience into the ups and downs of a nomadic family in Kazakhstan in the mid-twenties of the last century. It shows the generation, development and culmination of family tragedy, penetrating the continuous and brutal impact of the three dimensions of culture, religion and politics on the fate of individuals.
At the beginning of the film, Salimsak, an ordinary nomadic Kazakh, plays a woman in a drama against polygamy in the village, and as the wife of the audience, she feels that she has lost face and leaves the table early. After returning home, the husband angrily said "divorce" during a heated argument between the couple, and according to local religious tradition, as long as the husband said "divorce" to his wife three times in a row, it means that the marriage has been divorced. Whether it was said twice or three times, the couple was already entangled, but since then the gap of family breakdown has been torn apart.
Sarimsak, who had never thought of leaving his wife, prayed for a solution and explained to her that he blurted out lines that reversed the character. At that time, when the slogan of "women's liberation" in the Soviet Union was popular, propagating equality between men and women, women can have autonomy, and "live with whomever they want", from the fact that the wife has been pushing away her husband who is trying to get close at night and then blocking her daughter between the two, it can be seen that the wife's heart is not in turmoil. A traditional Kazakh woman who has lived in a polygamous family environment without any voice for generations, suddenly the Soviet cadres came down like gods and said to the women: "You should stand up, you have a very good future, you have the right to decide, you can decide your own destiny, you can justifiably hope for monogamy." As a result, some women are confused, suspicious, and uncertain about their identity. On the other hand, the new system in Kazakhstan at that time did not protect these women's new aspirations.
It was originally a quarrel between husband and wife, and no one knew about it behind closed doors, but it was known to everyone in the neighborhood, which was both ridiculous and unreasonable. Thoughtful but reasonable, there is no scene of the husband and wife holding the scriptures in their hands to read and pray to Allah, but only the three times of the seven- or eight-year-old daughter kneeling down to pray to Allah are all exchanged for their own lifespan, which shows the deep-rooted religious beliefs of their families. In the hearts of husbands and wives, you know and I know, and Allah knows more and is all-powerful. So the husband mentioned above prayed for a way to save him. It can be seen that the fierce collision between the modernization policy of the Soviet Union and the local traditional beliefs at that time reflected the helpless transformation of national culture in the political background, and the confusion between the "obsession" of individual life with faith and the new "discipline" suddenly implanted in the brain.
The wife had the idea of divorce, and the gangsters in the village instigated her, saying that the rich people in the neighboring village had taken a fancy to her. At this time, the honest husband came up with a bad idea again: since things have come to this point, it is better for the two to find someone to marry, and then divorce, and then the husband and wife remarry. Finally, one night in the eyes of her husband, the wife ran away from home and went to the rich man's house in the call of the "bad man", becoming the third wife of the rich man. Originally, the family of monogamy and a pair of children, because the husband starred in a drama against polygamy, turned the wife into a victim of polygamy, which seems to be a paradox but has a traceable source, all from "obsession". The first obsession stems from the doctrine of "Allah" in their hearts. The second level of obsession was forcibly instilled by Soviet officials with guns, that men and women are equal, that women are emancipated, that they can marry whoever they want, and that they can divorce if they want. When the staunch ethnic and religious beliefs are at odds with the widely publicized rules of life that are no less than religious beliefs, and at the same time are mixed and superimposed in the minds of the villagers, making them confused about what to do, thus triggering a series of "stories" and "accidents". The interweaving of these two layers of obsession shows how individual destiny is deformed and entangled under the action of multiple external forces, interweaving a complex and tangled mental picture.
There is a scene in the movie that is quite metaphorical, the higher-level officials go to the village, think that there is no red flag in the village, and there is no political propaganda slogan posted everywhere, so they tear a red cloth and let them hang it on the house of the village committee. One villager stood on top of the house and hung it, and six or seven people commanded below, the scene was very noisy and noisy, everyone commanded loudly at the same time but had different opinions, and the people in the house did not know who to listen to. Later, as representatives of the Soviet Union, the cadres stationed in the village asked several women who were "willing to die for the Soviet Union" to squeeze into the house and undress until they "exposed their shorts", and almost all of the shorts were actually made of "red flag cloth".
Back to the other two prayers of the little girl. For the first time, for a family of four, you can exchange forty years of life! The second time was when the mother ran away from home, and the unkempt father asked the little girl to pull the tail of the only old gray cow in the family to get the old cow back on his feet, but without success. The little girl silently walked into the snow and knelt down for the second time: Allah, I am willing to exchange two years of life for the immortality of the old cow. If the role of the little girl carries the deep-rooted traditional obsessions, then the abnormal behavior of the adults under the high pressure of the gun, the command of the red flag and the call of the slogan is the evil result of the superposition of new obsessions.
The question is, in this environment, can't everyone live calmly and consistently? No, the cadres stationed in the village and the womanizers in the village can just ride horses to lead singing, they can dig their noses to entertain themselves, and they can find a reason to gather the beautiful women in the village to coerce and lure them to satisfy their lustful desires. Relatively speaking, they do not believe in anything or do not believe firmly, have no "obsession", have neither devotion and reverence for Allah, but also because they stand with the "barrels of guns", they do not encounter a tragic encounter like the protagonist's family. The "gangsters", "womanizers", and "rich men who have married three terms" in the village shown to the audience by the director are happy and crazy in their lives, which is calm and self-consistent with the protagonist Salimsak's family.
"Divorce" is the director's debut film, which won the best film award at this year's international film festival, for which the director has been brewing for ten years. The story unfolds slowly, making people gradually get better, the external rhythm seems to be smooth and unremarkable, but the internal rhythm is relaxed, layers of conflict, echoing back and forth. The scene seems to be rough and primitive, but it is very natural and almost primitive, lamenting that the director did not use the "bombardment" of sound, light and electricity, but used an objective documentary narrative to advance the story, and the image style was realistic and natural. also sincerely sighed at the natural performance of the characters in the play, in which the wife played Omarova Amira, won the Golden Goblet Award for Best Actress.
At the end of the movie, in the vast world and the endless snow, the lonely little girl prays for her mother's life in exchange for her life. This is an inquiry about life, about faith, about the form of life unfolding, and it is an atypical tragic film intertwined with comedy elements. By showing the breakdown of a family, the film reveals how obsessions collide and ultimately destroy an otherwise beautiful life. Whether it is religious beliefs or political ideas, when they become unquestionable "obsessions", they have the power to tear people's hearts apart and destroy lives. Through delicate narration and in-depth character portrayal, the director has fully demonstrated and reflected on this theme.
Lim Kok Sook
Doctor of Literature and associate professor at the School of Film and Television Media, Shanghai Normal University
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