Beauty in film exists to evince craftsmanship, to accompany a great story, or it exists to hide a bad story or a nonexistent one. Emir Baigazin’s Life depicts the worst six months of its protagonist, Arman (Yerkebulan Tasynov), who starts out as an overqualified yet unemployed man in Almaty, Kazakhstan. he finally finds employment at a company that stores memories for people, but during one night of staying late, he accidentally deletes the company’s whole database. Mobsters kill the CEO and despite of Arman’s gaff, they install him as the new CEO. The mobsters do this and keep him alive in one condition – he has to build a pool for their kids or something like that. He’s compliant but life gets in the way somehow.
Life is basically one hour plot and two hours of sideways trajectory. It is the worst movie I’ve seen in the festival so far, and I have a strange feeling that this won’t change. This also has the worst depiction of someone with dwarfism in that it’s offensive and or pointless. The movie treats this person with dwarfism like all of the side characters – as kooky elements populating Almaty, and thus Arman’s life. Oh, I almost forgot that Arman has a fiancee (Karina Huramshina) who disappears an hour into the movie and doesn’t reappear. But let’s go back to the beauty here. Sure, there are some beautiful shots of every texture viewers expect to see in Almaty, but these shots feel just as pointless.
- Release Date: 9/12/2022
