Tulpan - The Long Return Home
Quick Thoughts: Tulpan (2008)
Made by Sergey Dvortsevoy, this is the Kazakh film of the series.
Tulpan is a phenomenal film that defies genre convention, seeking to find humour and humanity in a realist depiction of failure in the 'return to home' narrative. This kind of narrative zooms in on a later section of the wider hero narrative. We can locate it with a look at a film such as The Lion King. This film, of course, sees a young lion exiled from his home before having to make his return years later to defeat the evil forces that have overcome it. This type of narrative appears in many forms and usually sees its hero leave home to find a new way of living and a new philosophy. It is this period of learning and growth that allows them to become a true hero upon returning to and overcoming what they escaped, what they abandoned and/or what chased them away. 'Return to home' narratives do not spend much time on a reason for leaving home or the lessons learnt while away from it, rather, the difficulties in making a return home and completing a hero arc or individuation process.
We see this in The Lion King, but a good example of a more strict 'return to home' narrative would be The Meyerowitz Stories. This tells a familiar story about children who grow up to become people they think they want to be, but are reduced to children once again when childhood figures (parents) come back into their lives. In The Meyerowitz Stories, home is not necessarily returned to, rather, home finds our main characters, which is to say that their parents come to visit and they are made children again, wallowing in teenage anxieties and childhood trauma despite all of their successes as adults. One can find many stories like this, yet Tulpan seems to align itself with this genre. In such, this follows a discharged sailor from the Russian navy back to his home on the great flats (the steppe) of Kazakhstan. He has to move in with his sister and her family whilst struggling to find a wife; and without a wife he cannot become an independent shepherd and own his own home as his boss will not allow it.
Like The Meyerowitz Stories, Tulpan does not concern itself with triumph and does not project the idea that life experience away from home can help when you return to it. Instead of commenting on the psyche and the presence of childhood within the self, as The Meyerowitz Stories does with its failed return home narrative, Tulpan uses a failure to complete the hero narrative to speak on the disconnect between rural life and city life. Embedded in this very common dichotomy is a contrast between dreams and personal responsibility, and so the failures of our main characters are reflective of a deeply human naivety and incompleteness.
Without wanting to delve into this narrative and treat it too much like an allegory - something I don't think this forms - it seems best to emphasise the key mechanism, or element of film language, that this film uses to present both comedy and realism simultaneously. It is Dvortsevoy's chaotic long-shots that perfectly embed familial chaos into a vision of life as is. Through complicated blocking and some brilliant sound design, many of the shots captured in this film embrace the rift between the adult, child and animal world masterfully, using adults as figures haplessly seeking order whilst animals and children run amok.
Some sequences in this film are in actual fact subtly unbelievable; scenes with animals giving birth, wandering into frame at the perfect time and children, too, bounding onto set with incredible energy, tenacity and presence. How some shots were achieved is a slight mystery to me, but, above this, so much of this films feels improvised without being contrived and so, naturally, life seems to unfold in Tuplan. This is a credit to the extensive search for the right cast as well as the commitment to creating most of this story as the shooting was in progress that the director has spoken on. The end result speaks for itself; this is as unartificial as a narrative film can get, yet reveals truths that seem planted.
In and of itself, this is a joyous, minor masterpiece. I then highly recommend this. But, if you have seen this, what are you thoughts?
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Tulpan is a phenomenal film that defies genre convention, seeking to find humour and humanity in a realist depiction of failure in the 'return to home' narrative. This kind of narrative zooms in on a later section of the wider hero narrative. We can locate it with a look at a film such as The Lion King. This film, of course, sees a young lion exiled from his home before having to make his return years later to defeat the evil forces that have overcome it. This type of narrative appears in many forms and usually sees its hero leave home to find a new way of living and a new philosophy. It is this period of learning and growth that allows them to become a true hero upon returning to and overcoming what they escaped, what they abandoned and/or what chased them away. 'Return to home' narratives do not spend much time on a reason for leaving home or the lessons learnt while away from it, rather, the difficulties in making a return home and completing a hero arc or individuation process.
We see this in The Lion King, but a good example of a more strict 'return to home' narrative would be The Meyerowitz Stories. This tells a familiar story about children who grow up to become people they think they want to be, but are reduced to children once again when childhood figures (parents) come back into their lives. In The Meyerowitz Stories, home is not necessarily returned to, rather, home finds our main characters, which is to say that their parents come to visit and they are made children again, wallowing in teenage anxieties and childhood trauma despite all of their successes as adults. One can find many stories like this, yet Tulpan seems to align itself with this genre. In such, this follows a discharged sailor from the Russian navy back to his home on the great flats (the steppe) of Kazakhstan. He has to move in with his sister and her family whilst struggling to find a wife; and without a wife he cannot become an independent shepherd and own his own home as his boss will not allow it.
Like The Meyerowitz Stories, Tulpan does not concern itself with triumph and does not project the idea that life experience away from home can help when you return to it. Instead of commenting on the psyche and the presence of childhood within the self, as The Meyerowitz Stories does with its failed return home narrative, Tulpan uses a failure to complete the hero narrative to speak on the disconnect between rural life and city life. Embedded in this very common dichotomy is a contrast between dreams and personal responsibility, and so the failures of our main characters are reflective of a deeply human naivety and incompleteness.
Without wanting to delve into this narrative and treat it too much like an allegory - something I don't think this forms - it seems best to emphasise the key mechanism, or element of film language, that this film uses to present both comedy and realism simultaneously. It is Dvortsevoy's chaotic long-shots that perfectly embed familial chaos into a vision of life as is. Through complicated blocking and some brilliant sound design, many of the shots captured in this film embrace the rift between the adult, child and animal world masterfully, using adults as figures haplessly seeking order whilst animals and children run amok.
Some sequences in this film are in actual fact subtly unbelievable; scenes with animals giving birth, wandering into frame at the perfect time and children, too, bounding onto set with incredible energy, tenacity and presence. How some shots were achieved is a slight mystery to me, but, above this, so much of this films feels improvised without being contrived and so, naturally, life seems to unfold in Tuplan. This is a credit to the extensive search for the right cast as well as the commitment to creating most of this story as the shooting was in progress that the director has spoken on. The end result speaks for itself; this is as unartificial as a narrative film can get, yet reveals truths that seem planted.
In and of itself, this is a joyous, minor masterpiece. I then highly recommend this. But, if you have seen this, what are you thoughts?
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Previous post:
Singin' In The Rain - The Function Of The Number In A Musical
Next post:
Bouguereau: Select Paintings
More from me:
amazon.com/author/danielslack
