Darezhan Omirbaev's Student attempts to do for Crime and Punishment what his earlier film Chouga did for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, transposing Dostoyevsky's novel about a philosophically motivated murderer to modern-day Kazakhstan and keying in on the tale's unforgiving economic backdrop. The film opens in meta mode on a film set with the image of a clapperboard and an off-screen voice calling scene and take, but self-reflexivity isn't a technique Omirbaev will use again until the film's final shot of a minor character staring accusatorily out at the audience, which feels little more than cheap and rather obvious. And it's only there at the onset because the director wants to shoehorn in a conversation about the use value of modern cinema. Since Omirbaev favors irony of the heaviest-handed kind, he has the film-within-the-film's director argue for cinema's validity as mere entertainment, a stance clearly at loggerheads with what Omirbaev really wants to argue.
http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/05/cannes-film-festival-2012-student/#more-29208