Preserved in Negatives

“Be animal,” urges Garib (Zaza Bejashvili). “You are an animal. Use the spear.” He’s a photographer, directing his model, a fierce-looking black woman named Janet (Deborah Kidd) who writhes and grimaces as he asks, his camera’s point of view shot showing her open mouth and tongue. “You want to kill me,” Garib persists, a discordant piano soundtrack emphasizing the discomfort of the scene.

Most everything in this first scene in The Precinct (Sahe) is a cliché, from the artist’s arrogance to the model’s compliance to the silly skimpiness of her jungle-fantasy attire. And then the spell—such as it is—is broken. Garib’s door buzzes, and the session ends. Garib has mail, specifically, an invitation to accept a new assignment in Africa. Instantly, he dismisses Janet and she presses for more attention, her “animal” instincts apparently aroused. “Take me along,” she suggests, her breasts still visible. “It’s a beautiful opportunity. Put me in your pictures, darling…. I’m perfect for this job: I’m black.” Janet takes yet another step off the hackneyed cliff when he offers up a baggie of pot she’s just purchased, dangling from her perfect fingertips as she wraps her arm around Garib’s shoulders.

He’s already moved on, however, and as Janet leaves and he turns to a photo of a blond woman he has framed on his desk, the film turns to another scene. Here Sabina (Melissa Papel), a sculptor at work on her own images in clay plates, rough evocations of cave paintings. Her mother appears in a doorway behind her, parading a white wedding dress and insisting Sabina will be “gorgeous” in it. The daughter resists: despite her mother’s wish that she’ll marry a wealthy German banker who’s been calling, Sabina is intent on marrying her fiancé, Garib. Ah, you may be sighing to yourself, in this case, mom appears to be right. Garib is a lout, you’ve seen it. And in case you’re even slightly slow on this uptake, the camera shows a blue parakeet in a cage, chirping away and utterly confined.

Barely five minutes in to The Precinct, it looks dire: a trite situation rendered tritely. And yet, the film, selected by the National Committee of Azerbaijan for submission to the 83rd Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, has more on its mind than this set-up suggests.

That “more” has to do with the causes and costs of Garib’s arrogance, his use of art to shape his trauma and the relationship of his past to Azerbaijan’s. That’s not to say that Ilgar Safat’s film offers a precise critique of Soviet oppressions. But it does lay out the similar effects of political and cultural abuses on individual and collective bodies. 

As Garib’s professional interests suggest, these similarities are focused through women’s bodies. Though he seems inclined to see Sabina as a haven of sorts, he can’t seem to resist the lure of “animal” bodies—the lusts and carnal pleasures offered by his models and the rather banal and abstract notion of “Africa.” During a day trip to the ancient cave city of Gobustan, Sabina learns of Garib’s plan to delay the wedding. The ensuring argument leads, more or less, to a road accident, which leads in turn to an extended horror show.

Dragged from the flaming wreckage of their car, the couple winds up in what seems a police precinct, overseen by a sinister, unsurprisingly bald chief (Vahif Ibrahimoglu) and managed by two uniformed minions, fond of typing up reports and abusing suspects. The chief reveals a stash of files and information on both Sabina and Garib, making each feel guilty about past infractions—whether her brief self-exposure during a night out or his repeated yearning after glimpses of naked woman.

The difference in their offenses is specific, and has everything to do with their particular options in a traditional culture (hers to be exposed and vulnerable, read as perverse, his to desire and uncover, read as typically boyish). But while Sabina’s wrongdoing is only noted by the chief, Garib’s are hammered, to the point that the film changes shape, digging into his childhood via extended flashbacks. Here he’s played by the very affecting Timur Odushev, and his desires are shaped by his access to a camera (an excellent Rolleiflex box camera, which allows him to look at subjects and his lens alternately) and a wise, miserably experienced teacher, Josef (Ramis Ibragimov).

The boy doesn’t heed warnings by his teacher, of course, and instead falls in with a bad crowd, including a bully who models the man he will become, instructing the kid at first to develop pornographic photos and then to take photos himself. The flashbacks reveal also that the golden girl of Garib’s most treasured photograph (the one glimpsed in his apartment at the end of the first scene), Alina (Nina Rakova). As much as he admires and might respect her, the boy is also predictably convinced that becoming a man means conquering women and otherwise displaying power. When he comes to realize this course isn’t exactly right, he also comes to see the value of photographs, not as means to possess bodies, but as means to record aspirations and ideals, to imagine better selves.

His teacher Josef makes this much clear when he explains the relationship of photos to previous forms of self-representation and -preservation: “Our civilization created photographs, so we no longer had to carve our names in rock.” More to the point, photos allow makers to believe in their own legacies, without acknowledging or feeling responsible for their consequences. As the film touches on how photos can be used—by regimes, as evidence, or by cultures, as art—it allows that their effects are beyond artists’ control. Josef assesses, “‘Our immortality will be preserved in negatives,’ as my father liked to say.” So too, the film submits, our end.