‘Schizo’ unveils a singular purpose

“Schizo” is an ugly name for a dark and lovely piece of work, but maybe that’s the point. The world this film depicts can be a casually pitiless one, half modern and half tribal, but it can also offer compassion and beauty. What happens to its characters depends on their inner resources, on what they make of a social order that very much leaves them on their own.

The debut film of director and co-writer Guka Omarova, “Schizo” is set in a newly independent but still impoverished Kazakhstan of the early 1990s. A former actress and a protege of the celebrated Russian filmmaker Sergey Bodrov, who co-wrote the script, Omarova has put a distinctive dispassionate stamp on this story of a teenage boy trying by fits and starts to find his place in life.

That would be Mustafa (Olzhas Nussuppaev), not quite 15 but already saddled with that unfortunate Schizo nickname because of a perceived slowness and a penchant for causing disruptions which have gotten him kicked out of school.

Schizo lives with his mother (Gulnara Jeralieva) and her new boyfriend, Sakura (Eduard Tabyschev), a shady character involved in whatever illegal activities come easiest to hand. Sakura seems to like Schizo, a boy who, like the protagonist in the Dardenne brothers’ “La Promesse,” models himself after the amoral older man because there is no one else around.

Sakura, for his part, finds the boy useful in trolling crowds of the unemployed to round up men willing to participate in clandestine boxing matches, bouts whose unmediated savagery doesn’t deter individuals stranded by a stagnant economy.

The boxing matches stand as kind of a metaphor for “Schizo’s” portrait of Kazakhstan life. This is by and large a brutal, uncaring place, where things simply happen with an abrupt finality. It’s a dead-end world abandoned by its former Soviet overlords where the Kazakh versions of Wichita linemen steal the wire from sky-high power lines, knowing that the juice has long since been turned off.

Yet if the country is destitute, it is also, in Khasanbek Kydyraliyev’s photography, hauntingly beautiful. Director Omarova, who was born there, has a real feeling for the impressive emptiness of the vast grassy steppes, dotted here and there with ruins of Soviet-built technology.

She also has an exact sense of the rhythms of life in this far-off place, an ability to look at her culture from the inside but with a style, at once naive and sophisticated, that makes it accessible to others without diluting its essence.

As bleak as life seems in this dead-end world that both modernity and the USSR have failed, there are opportunities for human connection. A chance encounter with an ill-fated boxer leads Schizo to the man’s girlfriend Zina (Olga Landina), a 28-year-old single mother with the stunning face of a Slavic Sissy Spacek.

A hard-bitten former waitress, sharp-tongued, desperate, determined to be undeterred by a serious limp, Zina is like no one Schizo has even imagined. And to a young man barely past boyhood himself, her small son Sanzhik (Kanagat Nurtay) is a welcome find. Finally content in human company, Schizo, like a character out of a Jim Thompson novel, wonders how best to make this situation last.

Director Omarova has not only cast this film smartly (both Nussuppaev and Nurtay were discovered in orphanages) but has given the proceedings something of the quality of a present day legend. It’s the kind of story that might be told around a campfire about the coming of age of a future hero, someone who could conceivably do something significant. If he finds a way to simply survive.

*

‘Schizo’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Violent boxing sequences, a sexual scene

Olzhas Nussuppaev...Schizo

Eduard Tabyschev...Sakura

Olga Landina...Zina

Kanagat Nurtay...Sanzhik

A CTB (Russia) and Studio “Kazakhfilm” (Kazakhstan) production, released by Picture This! Entertainment. Director Guka Omarova. Producers Sergey Bodrov, Sergey Selyanov, Sergey Azimov. Screenplay by Guka Omarova & Sergey Bodrov. Director of photography Khasanbek Kydyraliyev. Editor Ivan Lebedev. Music Sig. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500; and the Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena, (626) 844-6500.