The bombastic English title might sound like it describes some comic book sci-fi epic, but in “Shyrakshy: Guardian of the Light” our hero does not wear a cape but a weathered cap, and t…
The bombastic English title might sound like it describes some comic book sci-fi epic, but in “Shyrakshy: Guardian of the Light” our hero does not wear a cape but a weathered cap, and the light he guards is not an interstellar death ray but the flickering beam of a battered old movie projector.
Movies about the movies, and more specifically about kindly old men passing on their eccentric cinephilia to a younger generation despite the march of mass-produced progress, are not a new phenomenon. But this Kazakhstan-set itinerant “Cinema Paradiso” distinguishes itself by its earnest desire to satisfy the same naive hunger for story and spectacle that got us all addicted to the movies in the first place.
Back in Kazakhstan, the soldier discovers that his pretty wife, presuming him dead after his long absence, has remarried and moved away. He hefts the heavy projector bag onto his shoulder and sets off on the road. Thirty years later he’s still on the move; now the projector sits in a bicycle sidecar, and the nomadic ex-soldier, deeply tanned and wrinkled, has earned his nickname cycling from village to village to screen one of his small store of movies.
Warmly photographed by Martin Sechanov, who finds as much rich interest in the faces of the watching farmers and stall owners as he does in the breathtaking, stark grandeur of the Kazakh countryside, the film is unfussily linear in construction. It bounds from episode to episode, under the folksy lone instrumentation of Kuat Shildebayev’s score, wearing its heart on its sleeve, none too concerned with anything but the broadest and most easily communicable emotions.
Lots of thing happen to him, but right until the heart-tugging climax Tarzan remains a gorgeously simple and oddly contented character, the kind of man who takes advantage of a rainstorm to wash the clothes he’s wearing. And as he is, so is “Shyrakshy” — not high art, perhaps, but sweeping, sincere, sentimental entertainment, with a generosity of spirit as wide as the Kazakh steppe and a heart made not of gold but of crackling, magical celluloid.
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