Review | Cold as Marble — a disappointing erotic thriller from Azerbaijan

★★☆☆☆

After a promising start, Azerbaijani director Asif Rustavmov’s sophomore film Cold as Marble comes to an unsatisfying climax.

Cold as Marble (2022) follows Rustamov’s  first feature film Down the River (2014), winning him prizes in the Vesoul Asian Film Festival and the Tallinn Black Nights Festival. Rustamov also acted as a co-writer on Ilgar Najaf’s The Pomegranate Orchard (2017).

As evidenced in The Pomegranate Orchard, Rustamov seems to like the trope of a return, a character reappearing after a long period of absence to upset a preexisting harmony. In Cold as Marble, the returning figure is the protagonist’s father, played by the well-known Azerbaijani actor Gurban Ismailov, who also played the father character in Najaf’s film.

None of the characters have names, presumably to give the film an archetypal feel. The father returns unannounced from prison, where he’d served 10 years for the murder of his wife. His son (Elshan Asgarov) is an art school graduate who works as a tombstone engraver for a local cemetery. His very first engraving was of his late mother.

Accompanied by jazz and sounds of panting, the opening shot wanders from a painting, to a gramophone, to our protagonist, the son, smoking a joint. Seconds later, a slender, red-toenailed foot slides into shot to pinch the joint between its toes as the camera pans to a naked woman, reclining on a wooden bed.

The son and his girlfriend (Natavan Abbasli), are having a tryst in an oddly dated bedroom. They’re drinking wine from crystal goblets, candles burn in candelabras, and the only elements that prevent the whole thing from coming off as a low-budget period piece are the son’s man-bun and the girlfriend’s bleeping iPhone.

Cold as Marble has an unexpectedly strong start as a dry comedy. The bedroom, we learn, is part of the house museum of some Azerbaijani academician, where the woman works as a tour guide. She is married; her husband works in business and is often abroad. Judging by her glitzy 4x4, she works in the museum out of boredom, and so as to have a secondary, private space of her own. This could be read as wry and slightly absurdist commentary on Rustamov’s part, on the measures married Azerbaijani women are forced to take in order to secure some independence.

Despite the presence of multiple sex scenes in Cold as Marble, Rustamov apparently had no problems with censorship. The film was even funded by the Ministry of Culture.

‘I love stories where the erotic is presented as something that is not special’, Rustamov told Panos Kotzathanasis. ‘I don’t want to hide some parts of life and show only what is allowed. For me it is just a part of life’.

It’s a slightly strange thing to say in the context of an erotic thriller, a genre which mines its drama precisely from its conception of sex as irrepressible and dangerous, the opposite of mundane.

We continue in this dryly funny vein for a while, before the drama of the film gets going. Much of the comedy comes from Rustamov’s portrayal of the customs around death in Azerbaijan. In one scene, the son walks two prospective clients, brothers, around the cemetery to show them his handiwork. They commission him, asking for a double portrait of their mother and father, along with a Mercedes Benz, engraved in red marble. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit much?’, the son asks, adding ‘How about I do it without the Mercedes?’.

After another rendezvous in the house museum, the son returns home to find his father has forced the door with a crowbar, and is sitting at the kitchen table in a grubby wife-beater, tattooed bicep on show. If you’ve watched Ismailov in The Pomegranate Orchard, you’ll be impressed by his versatility. He gives off this hard, volatile, wily charisma in Cold as Marble — it’s a sufficiently accomplished performance so as to lend weight to the flimsier parts of the film, and he was well deserving of his Best Actor award at the Tallinn festival.

Much of Cold as Marble unfolds in the cemetery, as it also becomes the father’s place of work. We learn of this real phenomenon of ex-cons working as fake mullahs in graveyards around Azerbaijan, getting tipped to read verses from the Quran. The father begins to do the same thing, donning a taqiyah, reciting the holy text to grieving widows by day, seducing them by night. He becomes this arch-hypocrite figure, a consummate moral relativist, resulting in many rather laboured scenes between father and son: ‘Why did you kill my mother?’, the son asks, to which the father retorts ‘Why are you having an affair with a married woman?’.

The erotic-thriller elements in Cold as Marble eventually take over.  Once the inciting incident has occurred, and the three characters are embroiled in a plot, the humour completely disappears and the whole thing begins a mechanical journey to its disappointing end. The sudden complication and darkening of the girlfriend’s character, effectively transforming her into a Lady MacBeth-type, is unconsidered and feels unlikely. As this shift is what propels the film to its climax, the whole thing goes a bit limp at the end.

Erotic thrillers are difficult — they have to toe a very fine line between the dramatic and the ridiculous, which is why so many have been welcomed into the canon of camp. It’s very easy for the sexiness and psychodrama to come off as too self-conscious, unbelievable, and fundamentally uncool. There’s no chance Cold as Marble could ever be read as camp, but it does read as immature. Judging by the initial humour and confident cinematography, it could have been a very different film.

Film details: Cold as Marble (2022) directed by Asif Rustavmov. Available to watch on Klassiki.

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