The details of the exotic trappings on display maybe relatively new but the rites-of-passage story is as old as civilisation itself in Kazakh filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan, a timeless and endearing coming-of-age tale for the Die Geschichte vom weinenden Kamel (The Story of the Weeping Camel) crowd. The director’s comfortable background in non-fiction films is clearly on display here, with the story of a herdsman-in-learning looking for a bride offering opportunities for real-life livestock birthing and other scenes in which the fictional story takes the backseat to what is simply part of daily life on the Kazakh Betpak Dala or Hunger Steppe. The film took the top prize in the Cannes Un certain regard section and could light up screens in arthouses across Europe in limited engagements.

Asa lives in a yurt, a traditional steppe tent made of a felt-covered wooden frame, with his sister Samal (Samal Yeslyamova), mother of three, and her stern husband Ondas (Ondasyn Besikbasov), who tries to teach Asa how to deal with the herd and become a good herdsman. Ondas might one day give Asa his own herd, but only after he gets married, a prospect that seems to vanish when Tulpan rejects him because "his ears are too big". This leads to a dryly comic scene in which the unlikeliest of look-alikes, the "Prince of America," is brought into the argument to defend the size and nobleness of Asa’s ears. 

 

Like in the Woodworth/Brosens film Khadak, which dealt with Mongolian herdsmen, the strong attraction of the city, where more misery awaits, and animal diseases are also present here, with the latter offering another opportunity for a gently comic scene in which a veterinarian (Esentai Tulendiev) arrives with a sick camel calf in the side-car of his motorbike and the worried camel mother follows him everywhere.

 

With the recent glut of arthouse films concentrating on nomadic life on the Asian steppes (The Story of the Weeping Camel, Die Höhle des gelben Hundes / The Cave of the Yellow Dog, Mongolian Ping Ping, Khadak) all becoming at least minor success stories, it is no wonder that more European companies are interested in financing these exotically dressed up fables mainly made for Western consumption. The story of Asa’s coming of age is in fact firmly entrenched in a conservative rites-of-passage narrative in which a successful birth of a young lamb is coupled with the birth of Asa as a young and capable herdsman.

 

In this context it is slightly worrying to find some of the same illnesses that plague Western films – such as the one-quirk-per-kid rule, or the some-porn-is-a-must rule – replicated here, though Dvortsevoy at least partially offsets this with his medium-length documentary background, which offers both authentic-feeling footage as well as a little uncertainty over how to handle his 100-minute running time.

 

Nevertheless, audiences are unlikely to be disappointed by Tulpan, which, as its Un certain regard prize might suggest, is a proper consensus choice for those looking for something familiar posing as something exotic.

 

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