Beauty and cruelty are the two sides of the same coin, the alpha and the omega of a well-ordered world. At least they are in Harmony Lessons, the feature film debut of Emir Baigazin, born in 1984. Based on his own screenplay, the Kazakh filmmaker sets a story of great cruelty in images of no less beauty. (Aziz Zhambakiyev was awarded the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at this year's Berlinale for his camerawork, which is characterized by sensuality and abstraction in equal measure).
Harmony Lessons tells the story of 13-year-old Aslan, who suffers from the perfidious bullying of his classmate Bolat. He, in turn, is nothing more than the executive organ of a violent structure that extends through all areas of this microcosm located in a remote village. Baigazin dissects this structure down to its finest ramifications, dissects the deep devastation it causes and paints a picture of a brutalized society without compassion, characterized by coldness and harshness. Ruthless and precise, with a gaze that discovers the well-designed, the graceful everywhere - but it no longer wants to fit in harmoniously with the content of the picture, it rather rubs against it unwieldily. A gap that is permanently painful.
