SƏPƏLƏNMİŞ ÖLÜMLƏR ARASINDA (In Between Dying) directed by Hilal Baydarov (Azerbaijan – Mexico – USA, 2020)
This strange and melancholy film , presented on the opening day of the 2021 Trieste Film Festival, is a road movie about love and death.
The action follows a single and highly eventful day in the life of a single man, Davud, who, bored with caring for his aging and ailing mother, takes to his scooter in search of something more thrilling and fulfilling. The problem, and it’s no small one, is that wherever he goes a death occurs.
Director Hilal Baydarov says: “A central concern in all my work is the person who is trying to understand the reason he is alive, present, here, in this world. The person who can‘t love, yet only believes in love. The person who is trying to find his real family, certain that this will bring real meaning to his life.”
The setting is Azerbaijan, a country beset with many restrictions. These is presumably why powerful emotions and religious motifs are expressed so metaphorically rather than literally. Some of the metaphors seem obvious, others are more obscure. One thing is sure, you won’t find much social realism here.
Cinematically, there are many long shots of figures in landscape. The haunting ambient soundtrack by Kənan Rüstəmli helps to give substance and a sense of visual poetry to the scenes.
Alone in the landscape – One man, one scooter and a tree
There are lots of open spaces, plenty of bad weather and numerous muddy fields. The landscape is often more bleak than beautiful. There are many shots of trees which I guess can be variously interpreted as symbols of growth, stability and gradual change.
The whole surreal picaresque journey begins when Davud shoots and kills a man selling weed. His only motive seems to be that he is defending his girl friend’s honor after the dealer has called her a bitch. Davud escapes on his scooter pursued by three men who, it soon transpires, who are not the brightest bulbs in the box. They have shitty cars and poor organisational skills so it’s no surprise that Davud remains at large.
The other deaths which occur are eventually interpreted as signs that Davud is special enough to deserve pardon. In some inexplicable way his presence alone has induced a young woman with rabies to bite and kill her abusive father, has prompted a wife to beat to death her drunken husband and wordlessly convinced a bride escaping an arranged marriage that shooting herself is a better option. As a taciturn and aimless individual, it’s hard to see how and why Davud should be blessed (or cursed) with such God-like powers over life and death. There are scenes of him fighting the earth and collapsing for no apparent reason as if struck down by the very force of nature. These don’t seem like the actions of a man with other-worldly gifts.
Woman in a grave
The most bizarre sequence is where he encounters a blind woman sitting beside an open grave in which her naked mother (still very much alive) is lying. Apparently the mother wants to be cleansed before being buried and Davud is happy to oblige as though he were Jesus washing away her sins.
It is far from clear from all this if we are to assume that Davud has some spiritual authority and the observation by a third party that “A patient man is never lost” does little to resolve the mystery.
The one message that does come through is that love is ultimately life’s one true purpose. A catalogue of bizarre yet curiously mundane deaths is an odd way to make such a fundamental point but I imagine it is all intended to show that Davud, like God, moves in mysterious ways.
