Foreign ideas, native spaces: Crime and Punishment in recent Asian cinema

Abstract

In recent years, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has furnished source material for two major Asian film directors: Darezhan Omirbaev (Student [2012]) and Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History [2013]). Each director adapts Dostoevsky’s critique of the newly emerging market economy in 1860s Russia in order to depict the impact of capitalism on postcolonial Asian societies, highlighting the alienation characters experience from themselves and in relation to other human beings in particular. In doing so, Omirbaev and Diaz recreate and transfer the novelist’s opposition between native, eastern, Russian Orthodox values and encroaching western ideas to their own countries. Omirbaev depicts the damage caused to ordinary Kazakhs by a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ economic model; Diaz chronicles the merciless toll of capitalism on the rural Filipino poor. Like Dostoevsky, each director proposes a return to native cultural, linguistic and environmental elements as a means of countering harmful foreign ideologies that victimize everyday people.