Realização:
Adilkhan YerzhanovArgumento:
Adilkhan YerzhanovCâmara:
Yerkinbek PtyraliyevSinopses(1)
A civil war rages across a vast, seemingly unpopulated landscape. As men fight and die, a mute woman searches for her son who has been kidnapped by child organ traffickers. She is accompanied by ‘the Steppenwolf’, a reformed ex-convict now hardened into a ruthless investigator. They resemble a bloody odd couple, but are determined to see their mission through, removing every obstacle – most of them human – in their path. Following the success of Assault, prolific filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov returns with Steppenwolf, his fifteenth feature in twelve years. Maintaining his signature absurdist touch, Steppenwolf stands as a testament to his prowess, skillfully interweaving classic elements from Westerns (with John Ford’s The Searchers, 1956, a key inspiration) road movies and revenge dramas. Yerzhanov's mastery lies in reducing these genres to their elemental core, presenting them in a clean-cut manner, almost resembling the structure of a video game – shoot, get treasure, repeat. This film is his most stylised, visually arresting and genre-defying work to date and as before, he doesn’t hold back on violence: it is bloody, furious and copious. Formally striking, Yerzhanov makes the most of the breathtaking landscape the action unfolds across, its beauty contrasting with the film’s bloodier elements, whose impact might be unbearable had Yerzhanov not leavened it with humour, albeit of the darkest kind. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)
(mais)Críticas (1)
This cynically cruel update of John Ford’s classic western The Searchers exposes viewers to a nihilistic world in which the only certainty is death, so the only people who will not become helpless victims are those who are devoted to it and seek it out. The final driving force of the apocalyptically degraded society remains the cycle of violence taken to such an extreme that the people resort to absurdity and monstrousness of Boschian proportions, though spatially spread out over bleak steppes, but paradoxically all the more concentrated in the details. No, this isn’t a Tarantino or Mad Max movie, because there isn’t anything cool or exaggerated here; it’s just desperately cynical, hopeless, grotesquely deviant and depressing. The violence isn’t given any aesthetic value, as it comes terrifyingly suddenly and laconically, going beyond the concepts of misogyny to a dimension of pure ruthlessness towards everyone and always bears down on both the victims and the perpetrators, even though the latter are not aware of it at any given moment. Despite all of that, however, Steppenwolf is a tremendously captivating work. Brutal instinctiveness meets iconographic symbolism in the refined shots, which combine the spectacular standard of modern western genre movies with the aesthetic tradition of the intellectual cinema of the former Eastern Bloc. Despite the details, this is not a midnight romp for an intoxicated audience, but a dramatic vision that cheap trash flicks and calculated exploitation movies can’t hold a candle to.
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