Review of Malika Musaeva’s film “The Cage is Looking for a Bird”

The world premiere of Malika Musaeva’s debut film “The Cage is Looking for a Bird” took place at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. But it was conceived back in the late 2010s, in a completely different reality. The more I appreciated its relevant and universal meaning Andrey Plakhov.

This is the first full-length film shot in the Chechen language to receive international festival recognition. Musaeva, herself a native of Chechnya, is a graduate of the Kabardino-Balkarian workshop of Alexander Sokurov. In recent years, we have become accustomed to the successes of this school; we have also become accustomed to the fact that its cross-cutting theme is the fate of a young woman from the North Caucasus, striving to escape from the tightness of family and clan ties, to free herself from the suffocating love of loved ones and the terror of the environment. This was the case in “Tightness” by Kantemir Balagov, and this was the case in the film “Unclenching Fists” by Kira Kovalenko.

So it is in the film “The Cage is Looking for a Bird”: its title, like the titles of the works of her fellow students in the workshop, is figurative and symbolic. They echo each other, and Kovalenko even has a short film to his credit, which is called exactly the same; Musaeva deliberately picked up a key theme for the entire workshop. The name is really meaningful, moreover, it is reversible, it allows for inversion, you can play with it. It’s not for nothing that many people confuse it: unconsciously paraphrasing, they call Musaeva’s film “The Bird is Looking for a Cage” – and both formulas are equally filled with meaning.

In “Crowdedness” the main character was a Jew from Nalchik, in “Fists” she was an Ossetian traumatized by Beslan, in “The Cage” her place was taken by seventeen-year-old Chechen Yakha (Khadizha Bataeva), a red-haired romantic schoolgirl with intelligent eyes. She collects bird feathers and looks like a bird herself; Off-screen bird singing quite naturally becomes the sonic leitmotif of the film. But the time of girlish freedom is limited. Like almost any of her peers from the area, Yahoo is being prepared for marriage, and she will not choose the groom. The girl must repeat the fate of her mother and older sister – become a submissive wife, give birth to children, and possibly suffer from an abusive husband. This is how nature and tradition have established it; one must obey them and the urgent advice of loved ones who love Yahoo and, undoubtedly, “wish her well.”

The heroine is trying to protest, deceive, and escape. The story is not unique, not even typical in some sense. But it is also typical that often the same girl, “having matured and become wiser,” becomes the guardian of the “cage”: she prevents her young relatives from breaking the vicious circle of patriarchy. The psychology of the cell sits firmly in the consciousness.

The film’s feminist message, reinforced by Chechen specificity, works in itself, but the film could easily slide into moralizing banality if not for its artistic structure, which exposes both talent and serious professional school. An expressive style of shooting and the aesthetics of a subjective camera are characteristic of most Sokurov graduates. This also applies to this case, but with some amendments. The influence of the master’s directorial style is especially felt here – even more than that of Balagov or Kovalenko. Alexander Zolotukhin’s films “Russian Boy” and “My Brother” are rather closer to Musaeva’s style of work, if we talk about Sokurov’s students.

But above all, the movie about the “lonely voice of a Chechen woman” is strikingly reminiscent of Sokurov himself from his early period. The very first frames of Musaeva’s film, in which Yakha and her best friend Madina run and frolic in the green hills surrounding the village, subtly resemble the beginning of “The Lonely Voice of a Man,” Sokurov’s famous debut. The same sensation of the earth’s firmament, bodily tactility, the same exhausting density of the frame and the transition to another, which is given by effort, a spasmodic jerk – and suddenly from all this a dizzying, intoxicating rhythm is born.

The student has a teacher, and there is also a “grand-teacher”: this is the great French director Robert Bresson, who is extremely valued by Sokurov. Scenes in which first two girls, and then one of them, roll down a hill are reminiscent of Bresson’s classic masterpiece “Mouchette”. But this does not look like student imitation or a cinephile exercise. No, in “The Cage” one can still see the director’s independent style, and behind it stands a personality, a view of the world, and this world itself is very different from both the European and the Russian.

The film was shot in the small village of Arshty on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia. The characters, local residents, practically play themselves. And above all, the heroines: in life and in the movies they are mothers and daughters, sisters, aunts, friends. Although the focus is on the story of the “Chechen Mouchette,” it is surrounded by a collage of several women’s destinies, reflected in one another. Men here mostly remain behind the scenes; in the frame are women guarding the cage.

The local community is paralyzed by fear: the cemetery of those killed in recent wars is too eloquent – so full that it is impossible to find the grave of a loved one. After all, Yakha’s father also did not die a natural death. Caring nature, the weight of a difficult history, the claustrophobia of the way of life in which a woman is destined for the role of a captive bird—all this fills the film with deep social and artistic meanings. One of the most relevant is that many people completely voluntarily prefer unfreedom to freedom.