What has a guy got to do to stay noticed? Take Bulgarian director Kamen Kalev’s 2009 feature debut Eastern Plays. It got good reviews (Variety called it “an impressive debut”), went to Cannes and won a clutch of awards on the festival circuit. But Kalev has made only three films in the intervening 15 years and his latest, 2020’s Février (aka February), is currently sitting on the IMDb with no reviews whatsoever to its name.
On the evidence of Eastern Plays, which is the only one of Kalev’s films I’ve seen, this is grossly unfair. This is an extraordinarily accomplished film, full of visual style, and loaded with a vivid punk energy and a driving forward momentum. Though a bit ragged here and there it really has what it takes in terms of storytelling pizzazz.
It’s a true story too. Two estranged brothers meet for the first time in ages on a dark night on a street in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. The younger one, Georgi, is taking part in the racist beating of an innocent family of Turks who are only in Sofia for the evening. The family has just had a nice dinner… and now this. Older brother Christo has stumbled onto the scene and gone to the aid of the Turks, earning a smack to the face for his trouble.
For both men it’s a wake-up moment. Georgi has been neglecting school and hanging with a gang of neo-Nazis. This is the moment he realises that gang membership entails more than just shaving his head and getting an edgy tattoo. Christo is a once-promising artist who’s also let things drift. With a methadone addiction and in a dead-end job, Christo’s accidental re-introduction to the brutal realities of life leads to him getting to know the daughter in the Turkish family, Isil, who awakens in him an urge to be his best self.
It’s Christo’s story. In the sense that Kalev’s film is much more interested in what happens to the older brother than the younger one. But also in the sense that these events actually happened to the guy playing Christo, and Kalev is shooting on the streets and in the places where they occurred.
Tragically, Christo Christov died before Kalev could finish his film (an “accident” is as much detail as I can scavenge) and Kalev had to finish the film using footage shot early on, which might explain the self-consciousness of Christov here and there, nicely tuned though his performance is for the most part. In only his second screen performance Ovanes Torosian, as Georgi, comes across like a young Tim Roth – angular and urgent – and like Kalev you wonder why his star hasn’t risen higher. Playing the catalytic young beauty Isil, Saadet Isil Aksoy is also playing a version of herself, as is Nikolina Iancheva, as Niki, the girlfriend Christo is keen to offload.
Kalev uses counterpoint all the way through. The claustrophobic communist-era blocks where Christo’s family live versus the open spaces on the edge of town. The dark nights and bright days. Silly Niki versus solid Isil. Thoughtful Christo versus kneejerk Georgi. Using an almost fractal style of shooting he composites together a story relying on suggestion rather than didacticism. You can read this as a state-of-the-nation address if you like, Bulgaria post-EU accession, with much of its brightest and best desperate to get away, but Kalev uses that political background as ambience rather than substance.
It’s a hopeful story and a good-looking one, with moments of poetry here and there that lift it into another realm – like Georgi suddenly helping an old guy back to his place with his flattened cardboard boxes while on the soundtrack Glenn Gould tinkles away exquisitely at JS Bach’s Concerto in D Minor. A poignant moment in a film full of them. Well worth seeking out.
Eastern Plays – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
