Goliath is a good fit for its Venice premiere in more ways than one. Inspired by Niccolò Macchiavelli’s ideas about power dynamics in human society and Sergio Leone’s eye for windswept lawlessness in all its gory glory, Kazakh cineaste Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s second film of 2022 is at once a cutting political allegory, a taut revenge tale and a visual extravaganza.
Revolving around a limping widower’s slow-burning attempt to unleash vengeance on murderous mobsters who have decimated his family, Goliath relocates the spaghetti western to Central Asia with masterful technique and invention. It’s bound to shoot its way through the festival circuit after its bow in the Horizons sidebar.
Yerzhanov’s first film of the year, the Rotterdam-premiered Assault, is set in deep winter and centres on the comical attempts of a bunch of useless schoolteachers to fight masked gunmen who have taken their pupils hostage. In Goliath, the filmmaker has replaced snow with sand and gags with gunfire, but the theme remains the same: ultimate evil lies not with those who terrorise, but with ordinary people – the masses drenched in moral corruption and cowardice – who allow the terror to persist.
On paper, Yerzhanov’s premise seems to be indeed a battle between Goliath and David on the Kazakh steppes. On one side, there’s Poshayev (Daniyar Alshinov), a buff gangster who rules the (fictional) village of Karatas with an iron fist and brooks no dissent, as shown by the way he and his gang ambush a police station, bully the cops and execute a woman who dares to file a report against him. On the other hand, there’s Arzu (Berik Aitzhanov), the woman’s stuttering, limping husband who’s left to grieve his loss while attending to the needs of his toddler daughter.
For the arrogant Poshayev, Arzu seems too weak to be a threat; he attends the woman’s funeral and offers Arzu his condolences and even a job at the tungsten mine he controls. Perversely, he continues to taunt and bait the poor man, sending his cronies to try and trick him into exacting revenge; whenever Arzu shows the tiniest bit of belligerence, Poshayev brings him closer into his orbit.
While quietly mulling over his sorry fate, Arzu has to contend with neighbours who treat him with either straightforward antagonism or fake sympathy: nearly everyone tells him they “understand” his pain and anguish, but they pressure him in public to let bygones be bygones. But it’s just cowardice: these same people will, on the sly, encourage Arzu to rid them of the dictator they actually despise.
And this is exactly what the last of the (slightly rephrased) Machiavelli quotes is about: “I taught princes to become tyrants, and the people to get rid of them.” But Yerzhanov is not celebrating the triumph of the enlightened and emancipated masses; here, it’s about the vicious circle in which the autocrat’s downfall is plotted by his enablers. It’s perhaps hardly coincidental that the current Kazakh president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, assumed power as the anointed heir of his autocratic predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbayev – and then proceeded to strip his mentor of his power and prestige.
In Karatas — the fictional village which serves as a backdrop to all Yerzhanov’s films — Goliath is not one man but the monstrous amoral masses who sit back, watch the bullets fly and reap their (un)just rewards. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, to see Arzu and Poshayev bonding and even fighting on the same side in certain scenes.
While Yerzhanov’s story and screenplay is refined in itself, his fatalism is hammered home by Aydar Sharipov’s sweeping widescreen imagery, which oozes desolation and destruction at every turn: the camera pans to reveal a surreal tungsten plant standing in the middle of a desert, weathered shacks reek of poverty and neglect, and on railway tracks to nowhere the final shootout unfolds. Beauty lurks in Goliath‘s every corner, and Yerzhanov has expanded his microcosmic universe further with this grandiose chronicle of small town brutality.
Director, screenwriter: Adilkhan Yerzhanov
Cast: Berik Aitzhanov, Daniyar Alshinov, Dmitriy Chebotarev, Alexandra Revenko
Producers: Olga Khlasheva, Serik Abishev, Alexandre Kochnev, Nurassyl Jarbassov, Hibrat Sarsenov, Geogriy Shabanov, Natalia Drozd Akan Satayev, Ablaykhan Ashimov
Cinematography: Aydar Sharipov
Editor: Azamat Utianov
Production designer: Yermek Utegenov
Music: Galymzhan Moldanazar
Sound designer: Ilya Gariyev
Production companies: Short Brothers, Changepoint, All Media Cmpany, Forest Film, Qazaqfilm, Cinerental
World sales: Short Brothers
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Horizons Extra)
In Kazakh
93 minutes
