![]() This well-paced production opens on Ascel, a girl on a country road in Kyrgyzstan, who sells apricots from a bucket with her brother. At the end you find yourself thinking: This is the real thing. There are no "feel-good" let-out clauses. But where it is most ambitious is in refusing to condescend to the audience. The Empty Home is properly ambitious in its imaginative grasp of an evolving society in all its complexity. ![]() ![]() But in fact all the acting is good, the secondary parts as well as the principals. The actress in question (Maral Koichukaraeva) is absolutely brilliant – as brilliant as she is beautiful. The heroine Ascel, for all her single-minded ruthlessness, keeps a kind of innocence: this is what is moving about the film – it's not completely a story about corruption. "Each man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost!" Yet even in Darwinian cesspools there are distinctions to be made. It is a world where crime is an ordinary part of life, and where middle-class values of decency and respect for the individual hold little sway. The milieu that is sketched here is beginning to be familiar to Western viewers through powerful films like last year's Elena. But who will outwit whom in this game of high stakes is kept back to the very last moment. Certainly, there is a prey and there is a pursuer. The movie's sophistication can be discerned in the way that the excitement of the tale (and it's very exciting) isn't dependent on straightforward genre conventions of torture and revenge. The skill of the film-makers is shown in the way that they trust the audience to pick up the story without necessarily having every last detail explained to us: we fill in the gaps ourselves and quite soon understand that a coherent network of social relationships – intelligently delineated and systematically developed – governs the overall drift of the story. A rich, detailed and unsentimental picture emerges of life in post-Soviet society, and how tough it is out there in the demise of traditional social values. Nurbek Egen and Ekaterina Tirdatova's film (Kyrgyzstan's nomination for the forthcoming foreign language Oscars) is very impressive: the viewer immediately gets the sense that these are film-makers who know their business.
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