AYKA – Film Review
Kazakh writer/director Sergey Dvortsevoy returns to Cannes Film Festival with Ayka– after 10 years, when he was discovered with his first full-length film Tulpan in the Un Certain Regard section.
Sympathy is put to the test with this intimate realistic drama.
Ayka is a young Kyrgyz girl who lives and works illegally in Moscow. We meet her for the first time in a maternity ward, where she just gave birth and abandons her infant to climb out of a window into the glacial Russian climate. Glacial is not only the climate but Ayka’s heart too.
It is indeed a blunt choice to start a film with such a harsh premise, one that many people would find repellent. It gets worse by the minute.
Ayka can’t afford to raise a child. She has debts to be paid (she’s constantly harassed by her landlord and presumably owns money to some ruthless Mafiosi who helped her cross the border).
Her never-ending odyssey in search of a job is atrocious and painful as labour can be.
The camera is always following her through the hellholes of Moscow, almost always in close-up. A promenade of misery impregnated by her post-partum bleeding.
She’s on her knees to find work (which is almost impossible due to her expired working permit), ready to accept anything from this society that despises her, mistreats her or simply ignores her. Every single character’s choice is on a string between life and death, but there is no way to suppress her natural instincts.
There are an insistence and an aggressive tone throughout the film. The biting cold, the continuous ringtone of Ayka’s telephone, crying babies, barking dogs, chicken carcasses to pluck and wash. Her persistent perspiration (as if to reminds us that she’s still alive). The sense of emergency is tangible. Now or never.
Ayka never tries to be sympathetic. She never has a moment of regret.
As we watch her harass, beg, steal, threaten and lie in order to survive, we’re forced to directly acknowledge the difficulty of her situation and ask ourselves: what causes an individual to lose an element of her humanity in the name of survival?
And lastly, is it her fault or ours?
