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Tulpan Movie Review

Tulpan is a 2008 Kazakh drama film directed by Sergey Dvortsevoy. This film has so much power in its imagery and simplicity that I was blown away by it.

Asa is living in the remote Kazakhstan steppe with his sister, her older husband and their three children. He dreams of becoming a herdsman and owning his own ranch, but he believes that to attain this goal, he must first marry. Asa hopes to marry Tulpan, the daughter of a neighboring family and the only eligible young woman in the area. However, her parents are unwilling to see their daughter marry an unemployed man with few prospects and Tulpan herself appears to have little interest in Asa.

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This is one of those movies that you just have to try out for yourself and then realize its greatness. It might be a tough sell, but it’s worth it in the end as it’s so incredible. Watching the film, I was transported to its setting through the sheer strength of the cinematography, score and sound. I hadn’t known a whole lot about this country and the life in the steppe, but now I realize just how difficult it is, yet also serene in its simplicity.

There are many parts of this film that truly got stuck in my mind after watching it due to the sheer memorability of it all. Of course, the most iconic sequence has to be the one where the protagonist tries to revive the fallen sheep and her baby through first aid. That was a tough, but necessary watch. The sheep birth sequence was also incredibly pulled off. It seemed so real and it must have been filmed authentically as it looked way too real to not be the case.

These sheep are so important to them that the sequences where they struggled were just heartbreaking. Gross for sure, but also incredibly touching. The movie definitely devotes a lot of time to the herding element, thus leading to a somewhat half-silent treatment for better and for worse. I wished to have heard more dialogue, but still the imagery here is the main selling point.

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I loved the protagonist. Asa is so memorable and his plight was very emotional to follow. There is this final sequence with him that closed the movie in such a stunningly emotional way. I did not quite care for the other characters, though there is one exception there and that is his friend Boni. He made this movie really endearing.

He is obsessed with everything from the west and he has the tendency to talk about their culture in such a romanticized, very sweet manner. Those moments were so cute. The use of the song Rivers of Babylon, a classic that I just adore, has never been better. My favorite scenes were when they traveled in their vehicle through the steep with the song played out loud.

Tulpan is, yes, very slowly paced and somewhat one-note and overly simplistic in its plot, but there is a lot of strength that it draws from the few characters that it develops properly and its struggles that those issues did not matter much. The same goes for the direction, which is absolutely brilliant, the score, which is stupendous, and the cinematography, which is incredibly artistic, poignant and striking in its realism and many greatly composed shots.

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