E-Mail This Article to a Friend SCHIZO

Back in the ’90s in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, so Guka Omarova’s stark but amiable film suggests, people enjoyed their own variation of David Fincher’s Fight Club. Brawny, unemployed workers would match up with a mafia-fronted professional fighter and fight bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred brawls to the finish in the hopes of winning cash or a car. In short, capitalism at its most basic, with workers literally selling their flesh for the profit of the few. Into this arena enters 15-year-old Mustafa (Olzhas Nusuppaev), nicknamed Schizo by his bullying schoolmates because of his seeming simplemindedness. Schizo can’t cope at school, and so he helps out his mother’s boyfriend Sakura, a gofer for the mobsters who’re organizing the bouts. When Schizo brings a dead fighter’s money to the man’s wife and child, he becomes inspired to combine the roles of Dostoyevsky’s saintly Prince Myshkin in The Idiot and Aleksei Balabanov’s Robin Hood–like thug in Brother. In her debut film, Omarova shows an eye for authentic detail and artful compositions — her favorite motif being extreme long shots of desolate steppes crossed by tiny figures. Like her hero, she has an unexpected talent for balancing the brutal with the humane. In Russian with English subtitles. (86 minutes)