THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
First feature film by Dea Kulumbegashvili, a Georgian director born in 1986, At the beginning is, let’s cut the word, an atrocious movie. Atrocious both for the horrible story he tells us and for the particularly uneasy way in which he tells it to us. Comfort lovers, go your way. The others will, no doubt, be confused about the point of view – necessary or accommodating? – its staging. No one will deny, in any case, the plastic strength of the film or the imprint it leaves in us, however painful it may be.
Take the story of Yana, a beautiful blonde in her forties who, along with her husband, is part of a small community of Jehovah’s Witnesses located in a Georgian province near the Caucasus mountains, a careful guardian of the Orthodox faith. One fine day, in the middle of the office, a hand throws a flaming torch into the building, which burns from floor to ceiling. Here begins a Kafkaesque adventure. Dispatching an inspector, the police made it clear to Yana’s husband, Jehovah’s Witnesses responsible for Georgia, that it would be better to withdraw his complaint given the hostile feeling aroused by the community among his neighbors.
Scandalous scene
Despite Yana’s injunctions, he does nothing, and on the contrary travels a lot to seek help and rebuild a center. Left alone at home, Yana receives a visit from a young police inspector with disturbing gentleness, who comes to threaten her and lets her understand that he can dispose of her and humiliate her as he pleases. What he will do. Cardinal and terrifying scene, which leaves the spectator nailed by discomfort to his chair. Scandalous scene, both in relation to the prerogatives and supposed impunity of the Georgian police forces and the male abjection it conveys.
The violence that inhabits this film is all the more significant as the staging makes distancing its touchstone. The fixed shot, the distant or medium point of view, the reduced visibility, the rarity of dialogue, the exhaustion of the duration, the pictorial composition of the shots are privileged here. This aesthetic, proceeding from a succession of stasis, is placed at the service of an ineffable overwhelming. The one that undoubtedly accompanies the fate of women in such a society, the story discreetly letting us understand that Yana would have given up an acting career to follow her husband in his edifying mission.
Yana – reimagined in the space of a shot that reveals her beauty from a vertical plunge on her iconic face resting on a carpet of leaves – is in truth despair made woman. She will go far in expressing the disgust that her condition inspires in her, as far as one can imagine on the part of a woman and a mother. Located somewhere between the Hungarian Béla Tarr and the Austrian Michael Haneke, Dea Kulumbegashvili does not hesitate to put the spectator to the test in the administration of his remarks. Everyone will see how far they agree to follow it.
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