There’s a marvellous freshness and gentleness to this 1991 movie, a little like early Truffaut, by Tajik-Russian director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov who achieved a wider festival prestige later in the 90s for his comedies Kosh Ba Kosh and Luna Papa. This film, Bratan or “Little Brother”, was in fact his debut, released when he was just 26 years old. Filmed in a seductive and luminous monochrome, it is a road movie, or rather a rail movie, that apparently makes quasi-documentary use of the non-professional people and places found along the way.
Two brothers, one about 16 and the other perhaps nine or ten, are living with their grandmother in a remote Tajik town: they are Farukh (Firus Sasaliyev) and Azamat, nicknamed “Pancake” (Timur Tursunov). The older boy seems to be drifting into petty crime: he and his mates have some sort of job flinging bundles containing vodka over the walls of the town prison for the inmates to enjoy. But Farukh has a plan: he and Pancake are going to hop aboard a rickety freight train, driven by their mate “Uncle” Nabi, and travel hundreds of miles to see their errant father who is now a prosperous doctor.
But will this man be as delighted to see them as Farukh hopes? This film is all about the journey, not the end point. Khudojnazarov conjures some wonderful scenes and vignettes: the train at one point challenges a tractor to a race along the road parallel to the track, and there’s a lovely image of some horses galloping ahead of them, as if in some kind of dream. The driver “Uncle” is a gamey character, picking up various people and stopping at stations en route and apparently engaging in relations with female passengers in his carriage; this is something that little Pancake can hardly comprehend as he peeps through a knothole at them.
And then there is the awful truth about Farukh’s motives for coming to visit his dad. Could it be that the son, like the father, yearns to escape the domestic responsibilities of childcare? A lovely, humane story.
• Bratan is available from 12 September on Klassiki.
