“In Between Dying” is a dreamlike story of personal transformation from rising Azerbaijani director Hilal Baydarov. With a fast-growing body of work that blends fiction and documentary, Baydarov is singlehandedly raising the profile of Azerbaijan at film festivals. “In Between Dying” is the story of one epochal day in the life of Davud (Orkhan Iskandarli), a young man who constantly dreams of finding his ‘real’ family, a hypothetical wife and child who will understand him and bring him a sense of fullness. His constant aspiration to an idealized existence makes him alienated from his own life, in which he grouchily shares a small house with his mother.
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Davud’s fateful day starts, appropriately, in a cemetery overlooking Baku. Davud kills a man after hearing an insult, mere feet away from an underworld leader, and flees, inaugurating a day of strange, symbolic encounters in which Death is never far behind him. While the exact details of each episode differ, each shares a pattern of an abused or forgotten woman seeking a form of liberation from male violence or neglect, from a rabid woman who has been chained and beaten by her father to a woman fleeing the alter of an arranged marriage.
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Davud feels sure his crime will meet a reprisal and that this day will be his last. His only conscious motive is fleeing his crime, not seeking out women to rescue, but time after time he encounters despondent women and offers a small kindness that acts as a catalyst. While Davud does not kill again, his journey leaves behind a trail of bodies as women finally exact revenge on their tormentors. Three gangsters pursue Davud throughout his day; they seem only tepidly interested in actually catching him, but rather act as a Greek chorus, bearing witness and judging the strange scenes Davud leaves in his wake.
Baydarov’s sense of Davud as a symbol lends a mythic/religious feel to the entire film, most of which takes place in stark, country landscapes that feel centuries away from modernity. Baydarov took inspiration from the story of the Buddha, who accidentally left his palace one day only to be permanently transformed by the suffering he witnessed. Similarly, Davud’s physical adventures are merely a façade to a spiritual struggle and his awakening to the suffering of the women around him disillusions him of the narratives he interposed on his life.
Both the film’s frank spirituality and its style recall Bresson and Tarkovsky. Like Tarkovsky in “Nostalghia,” Baydarov excels at creating large-scale tableaux incorporating the landscape for Davud to slowly traverse and emerge changed. Bresson once wrote, “Build your film on white, on silence, and on stillness”, words that Baydarov seems to have taken to heart, frequently allowing white to dominate the frame, letting Davud disappear into the landscape. Like Bresson, Baydarov has a deep empathy for the downtrodden and thinks people are most revelatory in their most natural surroundings. These may be too heady of comparisons for such a young filmmaker, but Baydarov has certainly learned lessons from them and is walking in their footsteps. “In Between Dying” is a powerful parable of spiritual awakening. [B+]
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