With Chouga, Darezhan Omirbaev strips down and renders Tolstoy's Anna Karenina into a whole construction of interlocking jigsaw spaces and interchanging relationships in which nearly every cut links one gaze with its beholder, one room with another, one death with a birth, or one person looking out to an ensuing action over and over again: something they're looking at passively, something they've incited, or something they've perhaps imagined and now comes to pass. Perhaps no director since Hitchcock has been quite this obsessed with glimpses and gazes; probably a third of Chouga's perfectly-patterned shots, mostly flat, grid-like tableaux of rooms, turn out to have been POVs in the following (wider) shot (as if human vision composes precisely as a camera), and it's quite possible that many more are as well, that we simply don't get a subsequent perspective to prove so.  David Phelps