Asa, a young and cheerful dreamer, returns from his Russian naval service to his sister’s nomadic family on the desolate Hunger Steppe of central Asia, so that he can begin his own life as a shepherd. But before he can tend a flock of his own, Asa must first win the hand of the only eligible girl for miles—his mysterious neighbor, Tulpan.
The Russian filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy had gained a reputation for documentaries, but in the 2008 Tulpan he tries his hand at fiction with this story set in Kazakhstan. After serving in the Russian Navy, Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov) returns to the Kazakh steppe, living with his sister (Samal Yeslyamova) and brother-in-law (Ondasyn Besikbasov) while he tries to court the only unmarried young woman within hundred of kilometres.
As a sort of documentary, Tulpan will be an interesting experience for viewers in the West, capturing the desolation of the Kazakh steppe and the hard work that herders there must do to eke out a living. Some of the younger characters feel the draw of the big city, whose modernity offers them an easier life than the dull steppe. As a linguist, I found that the film represented well the Russian-Kazakh code-switching common after the Soviet era, which only underscores how these people feel torn between two worlds. The arguable climax of the movie comes with Asa assisting the real-life birth of a sheep, which is depicted realistically so that the audience learns something, but thankfully not too graphically.
But as fiction, I am less impressed with the film. I get the feeling that Asa's pursuit of Tulpan was the centre of the original script, but was mostly set aside after Dvortsevoy decided to improvise much of the film. The result is a lack of substance outside the pure observation of traditional life. All in all, it's worth seeing once and you'll learn something, but it's no classic.