Audience Member
TO GET TO HEAVEN, FIRST YOU HAVE TO DIE (2006) is a film by Jamshed Usmonov set in the director's native Tajikistan. Kamal (Khurshed Golibekov) is a young man who has recently married, but he suffers from impotence and has been unable to consummate his marriage. After three months, he visits a doctor and then undertakes to learn the art of love from some older woman in the capital. The first half of the film has him stalking various women around Dushanbe. This odyssey in an American film would probably have been portrayed in a goofy underdog fashion, but Kamal's attempts are creepy, though we do feel his pain.
About halfway through the film, Kamal ends up sleeping with the wife (Dinara Drukarova) of a thug (Maruf Pulodzoda). This lowlife finds out, he doesn't mind as he had been separated from his wife for some time anyway, and takes Kamal under his wing as they burgle their way around town. After witnessing the full extent of his partner's brutality, Kamal turns on him in a bloody fashion, which happens to cure his sexual dysfunction.
All in all, I can't recommend TO GET TO HEAVEN to general audiences. This isn't the first film I've seen by a young director that begins in one way and then transitions too suddenly into mobsters and violence. Yes, I get the Oedipal allusions and the probing of the male psyche, but the plot arc chosen for this study just screams "immature scriptwriter". The cinematography is also unimaginative.
I could compliment only two aspects, which will probably only interest a rather niche audience. One is that I'm bound for Tajikistan in less than a week as I write this, and there are few internationally available films from the country, so I guess TO GET TO HEAVEN was useful as a glimpse of Tajikistan. The acting by Drukarova and Pulodzoda was competent, and perhaps the same could be said for Golibekov if the character he portrays weren't so cringingly awkward to really appreciate.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/08/23
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Audience Member
Enigmatic, unexpected, compelling - another voice and another way of looking at things generally unavailable in anglophone cinema.
Deals with sex without titillating - an unfussy look at what must be the routine rebuffs that meet the unsolicited male gaze. It repudiates sexual violence in an equally unexpected way - by putting it offstage.
Full of the loose ends and half explained details that are forbidden in mainstream commercial cinema. Part of its strength lies in the fact that there's no music in the soundtrack: everything is in the acting and the setting.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
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Audience Member
Great film, apt title, although I'm not sure how far comparisons to Kieslowski's 'A Short Film About Love' go..Still, worthy of a watch..
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/23/23
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Audience Member
omg. What a load of rubbish. I have never seen such a dull film. I was bored stiff. So many scenes with no script.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
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Audience Member
A low budget film from Tajikistan about male impotence....wait, where are you going? Come back! An impotent young man, unable to consummate his recent marriage discovers what it is to be a man, with dark, dangerous results. What starts as like a Central Asian Todd Solondz film, a black comedy of embarrassment turns into a sinister thriller, approaching some morally ambiguous terrain. It's tastefully shot but ultimately troubling with many questions and fewer answers.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/19/23
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Mike M
An intriguing thing: a thwarted sex comedy that morphs into something else entirely. The genre-warping points to a film both critical of, and still somewhat in thrall to, the notion of what a "real man" might be; it's perhaps a pity the final act should arm Kamal with such a bluntly symbolic shotgun. The imagery elsewhere is richer for its simplicity, like the mini-ballet played out between male and female fingers on a bus handrail. There are rough edges here, but Usmonov is a filmmaker worth persisting with.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
11/26/08
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