Official Selection Competition section - review - ADVENTURE (Priklyuchenie) by Nariman Turebayev
Turebayev loosely adapts Dostoevsky’s White Nights for his latest work Adventure, presented in the official competition selection of the 49th Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
This is the story of a young man who works nights as a guardian. His name is Marat and he leads a monotonous and lonely life. One night he meets a young woman after she was attacked by a man as she was waiting for someone. This woman becomes a type of femme fatale, to whom he is strangely attracted despite the fact that she seems to walk all over her.
Dostoevsky is one of the most adaptable writers in today’s cinema. Yet, Turebayev doesn’t try to force feed his viewer with psychological intensity. Instead, he allows it to play quite forcefully disguised behind a thick layer of deadpan that always leaves a little ambiguity in the thin line between comedy, drama and mystery that dictates every scene.
Despite little camera movements and often repetitive shots of settings and situations, there is some visual delight in the careful and simultaneously often plain composition of the frames. There is no doubt that this will have made it easier on the producer’s pockets, yet at the same time the repetitiveness contributes to intensify each of the often uninteresting character exchanges in a gripping repetitive aura. This clever pattern also makes for a rather tame and passive puzzle that is nevertheless intriguing throughout.
This is a style that is becoming increasingly popular, and seems to really have taken off from such masters as Kiarostami and more recent examples such as Ikera Akida’s Anatomy of a Paper Clip.
It’s as if Adventure had the ability to remain still and settled despite cinematic preconception would constantly beg for more. The monotone line delivery of the characters almost seems playful and downright funny, perhaps due to general common impulses we automatically from having been conventionally cinematic educated.
At the same time, it is precisely this that makes Adventure worth watching. In many ways, Turebayev is able to faithfully understand and represent a universal feeling of unrequited love in a most entrapping and involving way.