Yellow Cat

Directed by Adhilkan Yerzhanov

Running time: 1hr29 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Azamat Nigmanov stars in Yellow Cat

Shabby drifter Kermek is obsessed with Alain Delon in Jean-Paul Melville's taciturn noir Le Samouraï, and fancies himself a close mimic of the French star's aloofly cool demeanour and chic hitman style: well, he has a cheap fedora, at least, even if his yellow Hawaiian shirt doesn't exactly help the look. He's hasn't seen all of Le Samouraï anyway, but that's not his fault. He was only ever allowed to watch an hour of any given film in the orphanage where he grew up, and that has yielded in Kermek a fractured cinephilia that is both sketchily informed and so sincerely devoted he wants to share it with the world. Newly out of prison, this dim, cuddly ex-con is pursuing his dream of building a cinema in the desolate mountains of Kazakhstan: like most of the films he loves, he doesn't know how this story will end, but we do.

Conventional movie mythology is repurposed and remixed throughout Yellow Cat, a delightfully askew caper from prolific, peculiar Kazakh auteur Adhilkan Yerzhanov, which incorporates elements and enactments of Bonnie and Clyde, Singin' in the Rain and Badlands — among who knows how many others — into its own original, indigenous spin on the love-on-the-run thriller. Throughout its bustling, surprisingly joke-stacked yet frequently melancholic 89 minutes, Yerzhanov pulls off the rare, deft tonal trick of whimsy without tweeness.

Its world, largely limited to a dead-end town on the windswept Kazakh steppes familiar from the director's previous films, may be exaggerated and inflected with Hollywood fiction, but it never feels artificial or uninhabited. (Yerkinbek Ptyraliyev’s sparse widescreen cinematography favors a distinctly earthy, non-Technicolor palette of raincloud greys and dried mustard.) Yerzhanov treats his characters not like amusing dolls but like characters, in every sense of the word. And he has one for the ages in Kermek, an oddly graceful loser (played with an exquisitely deadpan gift for physical comedy by Azamat Nigmanov) with a battered but hopeful worldview, and a cheerful sense that the movies (or what he's seen of them, anyway) can always get him by, even when his mad cinema-building quest gets the law and the mob on his tail. When he meets flame-haired sex worker Eva (Kamila Nugmanova), they are instantly entangled in both romantic love and movie love — she knows Le Samouraï too! — and at a certain point, Yellow Cat doesn't see the difference.

YELLOW CAT (2020) Written by Inna Smailova and Adilkhan Yerzhanov | Shot by Yerkinbek Ptyraliyev | Edited by Adilkhan Yerzhanov

Available to watch on Mubi.