Tender Heart

(ALCIZ SHUREK/COEUR FRAGILE) ((KAZAKH-FRENCH))

A Kazakhfilm Studios (Alma-Ata)/ACC (Paris) production. (International sales: ACC.) Produced by Anar Kachaganova, Ken Legargeant, Romaine Legargeant. Executive producer, Nina Lavrik. Directed by Ermek Shinarbaev. Screenplay, Leila Akhinjanova.

Aijan ... Natalya Arinbassarova
Adik ... Adilkhan Essenboulatov
Saoule ... Saoule Souleymenova

An aimless 25-year-old's obsessive love for a former ballet star may sound like the stuff of cloying sentimentality, but in "Tender Heart" it's sketched with an emotional starkness and unsettling, melancholy undercurrent that shift it into a less obvious, more acutely felt register. The same poise and control that distinguished Kazakh new wave figure Ermek Shinarbaev's previous work should guide this modest but compelling feature to a run of festival slots.

The first co-production between Kazakhstan and France, film is the fruit of a pact firmed at the 1993 Locarno fest, where Shinarbaev's "A Place on the Tricorne" took the top award.

Graceful opening sequence presents aging ballerina Aijan (Natalya Arinbassarova) giving dance classes in an Alma-Ata theater. Her son is away studying in Paris, and her troubled daughter (Saoule Souleymenova) is on the verge of moving out of their apartment, leaving her mother alone. Returning home one evening, Aijan is assailed by a down-and-out youth, Adik (Adilkhan Essenboulatov), who tries to rape her.

Perhaps sensing a kindred victim of solitude, Aijan takes no legal action, and Adik soon becomes a regular fixture in the apartment building and theater. His advances begin to seem more driven by desperation, and when he lands dead drunk and ill on her doorstep, she finally lets him into her apartment and her life.

From then on, Aijan's reaction wavers between compassion and fear, one minute stabbing Adik after a too-heated display of passion, the next minute dressing the wound. But, certain of eventual humiliation due to their pronounced age difference, she gently pushes him away.

As in "Tricorne," Shinarbaev is less concerned with narrative explicitness than with establishing a climate permeated with sorrow in which writer Leila Akhinjanova's characters are piteously suspended. Some auds may find his style too inert, and his sideline focus on Aijan's daughter as she hits the emotional skids feels distracted. But on the whole, the director's tack of uncovering emotional shadings by maintaining a cool distance from his characters pays dividends.

The same distance is mirrored in Sergei Kosmanev's sedately composed camerawork, frequently framing subjects from the opposite end of dark corridors, or through windows or doors.

Both leads are consistently impressive, with Arinbassarova's regal mix of dignified detachment and pained longing giving the film a potent center.

Camera (color), Sergei Kosmanev; editors, Marie-France Poulizac, Khadisha Ourmourzina; art direction, Vladimir Trapeznikof; costume design, Elena Svavilnayo; sound, Sergei Lobanov, Thierry Delor. Reviewed at San Sebastian Film Festival (competing), Sept. 23, 1994. Running time: 84 MIN.

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