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Trains as metaphors for time, birds as symbols of freedom and love — they’ve been done before. Perhaps it takes the magic of the Central Asian steppes to restore their power and meaning. By turns æthereal and raunchy, Kyrgyzstan filmmaker Marat Sarulu’s My Brother Silk Road evokes an uncanny world, two in fact. The first is that of three rough-and-tumble peasant children, two boys and a girl, who are wandering through bucolic black-and-white landscapes to the railroad tracks that have taken the place of the ancient Silk Road, the trading route from east to west. They’re innocent, but not entirely, and they long to escape their childhood idyll for the adventures of adulthood and distant lands. Meanwhile, the train hurtles toward them, and on board are those who have been there and done that, and they are thugs, wastrels, embittered women, and an artist whose portraits reveal the true nature of his subjects. Sarulu’s film may be more choppy than elliptical, but it combines the melancholy and richness of 19th-century Russian literature with the mystical style of Aleksandr Sokurov and Andrei Tarkovsky. In Kyrgyz with English subtitles. (black and white/80 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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