According to former cop and convicted kidnapper Davud, an old legend about guiding cranes home through dark forests with carefully placed lanterns doubles as a trap for hunters to locate them. That’s an apt metaphor for both characters and Crane Lantern (‘Durna Cıragı‘) itself, Azerbaijani writer-director Hilal Baydarov’s second release in roughly a year, after the Venice bow of In Between Dying in 2020.
Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas and actor Danny Glover return as producers on some fairly familiar material. If it weren’t already clear from his first two features, Crane Lantern cements Baydarov’s place among current cinema’s most ethereal, existentially focused artists, one who aggressively steers in the opposite direction from linear narrative. Baydarov has quickly created a filmic brand (for lack of a better word) for himself, inspired by his former teacher Bela Tarr and marked by stories rooted in legend (like the Siddhartha tale from Dying), protagonists named Davud, long static shots of Azerbaijan’s scarred earth and poetic voiceovers that many would dismiss as pretentious. Just as many would call Baydarov’s work dreamy and compelling, and that’s going to carry Crane Lantern to more than its share of festivals after its world premiere at Tokyo.
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The plot, such as it is, is a carefully constructed series of quasi-vignettes, in which law student Musa (Elshan Abbasov) examines the case of a kidnapper, Davud (Baydarov regular Orxan Iskandarli), in custody for abducting four women, none of whom want to press charges. The meetings between Musa, Davud and his ostensible victims unfold against impeccably composed forest idylls, shimmering, grasshopper-dotted oil fields, rocky central Asian deserts and derelict buildings that often reflect internal thoughts and emotions, though whose thoughts and emotions they reflect remains unclear.
The women Davud kidnapped are also the conduits through which the film’s big ideas are examined, ideas ranging from crime, justice and punishment to the nature of reality (imprinted on almost every shot), love and humanity — itself an unspoken question, expressed by almost all the characters when they recite lines from a verse: “I am human, and nothing about being human is strange to me.” There’s a fluidity to their identities; only some are identified by name, lending a universality to the themes. Baydarov doubles down on this commonality by directing his actors — Nigar Isayeva, Sada Hasanova, Aytakin Mirisova and Rana Asgarova — to new heights of shared melancholy, frequently shot in luminous close-up. They’re convinced Davud has made their lives better somehow, even as he exists on the periphery of their memories.
The theatricality of Baydarov’s chosen spaces and the frequent poetical musings combine to create an almost otherworldly tone that blurs the line between truth and illusion, and inevitably raises the question of whether Davud is a con or if there’s some degree of wisdom in his philosophical ramblings. Is he truly enlightened in some way that Musa and his captives are not?
That’s not a question Baydarov cares to answer, nor is it particularly necessary, given that Crane Lantern is another almost impressionistic visual poem, seeming to exist out of time. Baydarov essentially abandons the modest narrative structure of In Between Dying in favor of stark, admittedly beautiful images and a mesmerizing score (by Kenan Rustamli) that forges mood rather than action, employing voiceover meditations in lieu of dialogue. The director serves as his own cinematographer, and his documentarian eye is in full evidence, gracefully toggling between blocky geometries and lush nature as the poetry demands. Baydarov may have a way to go before he catches up to Tarr’s level of elegance, but he’s certainly bucking to take up the master’s mantle.
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