In Usmonov's last movie, the black comedy Angel on the Right, a hard man is lured from Moscow to his remote native village in Tajikistan to be shaken down by the corrupt mayor. His new film is set in a similar godforsaken corner of the former USSR. The guileless 20-year-old Kamal, incapable of consummating his three-month-old marriage, sets off on a therapeutic journey. Along the way, he stalks a succession of unresponsive women until he's taken to bed by a factory seamstress. But nothing happens. Her husband, a sadistic crook, takes Kamal under his wing for a series of robberies that culminates in murder and rape.

Kamal turns on his mentor, blows his head off with a shotgun, goes back to have rough sex with the man's widow and heads off home cured. This is an unconvincing example of a genre that might be dubbed Art House Machismo.