Highway

Sergey Dvortsevoy's cinematic essay starts off promising enough: under a parched blue sky at a hard-scrabble village on the steppes, the exotic tootle of a folk instrument sounds, and a bare-chested boy in opulent turquoise pantaloons lifts an enormous weight by his teeth while an older man slams it with a sledge. The small group of ragamuffin kids watching the feat disbands; the circus show is over. Unfortunately, for the viewers of this misdirected bit of cinema vérité, the show is pretty much over, too. Dvortsevoy's wobbly hand-held camera follows the hapless, threadbare Tadjibajev family circus as it putters along the trans-Kazakhstanian highway in its creaky bus in search of a few onlookers to call an audience. While this could have been a nifty and engaging subject, had the filmmaker been more technically adept at his craft, the piece lumbers along fecklessly, without finding any real emotional core or truth in its subjects. All we're left with is a series of disparate scenes, some of which are admittedly quite wonderful: the kids in the family capturing a young eagle, or the mother singing a soft lullaby while the family sleeps. In most instances, however, the filmmaker seems constitutionally incapable of exerting a stern editing hand; most sequences seem to go on forever and for no particular reason. In the end, Dvortsevoy makes the fatal mistake of trying to convey the boredom and loneliness of his peripatetic subjects by boring the audience. A marginal buy at best. Aud: C, P. (G. Handman)