Rita Safariants: review about Princess Nazik

At first glance, Erkin Saliev's feature film, Princess Nazik (2012), is a familiar narrative of the prodigal father reconnecting with his precocious young daughter set against the backdrop of rural life in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. In a deliberate nod to the late Soviet tradition of naturalistic cinematic depictions of imperfect family life that have seen numerous permutations from Vladimir Men’shov’sMoscow Does Not Believe In Tears (Moskva slezam ne verit, 1979) to Vasilii Pichul’s Little Vera (Malen’kaia Vera, 1986) and Karen Shakhnazarov’s American Daughter (Amerikanskaia doch’, 1998), Saliev crafts yet another story of complex human relationships and the dexterity of a child’s imagination. 

The film follows seven year old Aidai, masterfully played by Saliev’s own daughter, Aidai Salieva, as she battles her fatherless only-child loneliness and the quotidian monotony of village life through an elaborate world of fairytale make-believe captured in her vivid drawings. Aidai lives in a small two-family clay house with her young single mother Rumiya (Rumiya Agisheva), who works at the local trout farm, yet whose primary income is dependent on her next-door neighbors’ poaching and drug trafficking operation. Early in the film, we see mother and daughter harvesting cannabis in a nearby field to make up for a low trout count in Rumiya’s most recent delivery. Rumiya keeps the identity of her daughter’s father a secret, while struggling to raise the child by herself. Their quiet life is shaken up when a guest arrives unexpectedly at their neighbors’ house – a melancholy and somewhat reclusive Kazakh artist named Emil (Dosmat Sadyrkulov), who has recently returned from a creatively and financially disappointing stay in Paris. Saliev relies on symbolic markers as an expository of Emil’s circumstances, like, for example, the cheaply made imported sun hat that he gives Raziya, the matron of the house and Rumiya’s neighbor, as his “gift from Paris.” The hat, bearing a Chinese brand name, eventually ends up in Aidai’s possession and closely resembles the girl’s own hand-me-downs. In Saliev’s interpretation of rural Kyrgyz everyday life, Emil becomes a symbol of post-Soviet disenchantment with the West as a land of prosperity.

Continuation here

Erkin Saliev: Princess Nazik (Printsessa Nazik, 2012)

reviewed by Rita Safariants © 2014

Issue 44 (2014)