A Film a Week - The Moon Is a Father of Mine

 previously published on Cineuropa

George Ovashvili’s fifth feature film, The Moon Is a Father of Mine, which is premiering in competition in Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival, might serve as a prime example of the use and slight subversiveness of the “Chekhov’s gun” principle in dramaturgy. The principle dictates that, if the firearm is displayed in the first act, it must go off and set up a plot twist in the third. In the present film, the rifle is presented more elaborately at the very end of the introduction before enjoying two additional moments in the limelight in the hunting sequence which takes up most of the second act, and with the firing of the rifle opening the film’s final act.

Grade school student Toma (newcomer Giorgi Gigauri) is living with his grandma Sidonia (Kira Andronikashvili) in a town apartment in the autumn of 1991, while his mother is living and working away in Moscow. Toma has a knack of getting into trouble, especially when he decides to stand up to a group of bullies who are targeting him for having revealed his feelings to his classmate Anana. Tired of scolding him for his behaviour, the grandmother accepts the boy’s father Nemo (seasoned actor Givi Chugaushvili) taking care of Toma in his ancestral village in the mountains.

Once in the mountains, the father and son begin to get to know each other better. Toma learns that his father was imprisoned for killing a poacher while working as a ranger, and Nemo tries to pass on some wisdom to his son. But as soon as they start to trust each other implicitly, destiny separates them again.

The trouble is that, in Ovashvili’s movie, the third act seems a little anti-climactic and therefore not particularly purposeful, but that’s only one of the film’s issues. The magic realism introduced by the filmmaker at a given point never gets a firm foothold since it clashes with the social realist air established in the opening sequence. Slightly wooden acting and declamatory deliveries of stilted or falsely poetic dialogue, over-use of the shallow focus trick in Christos Karamanis’ cinematography, which only occasionally opens up onto the unique, breath-taking and eerie mountainous landscape, and Josef Bardanashvili and Jakub Kudlác’s unnerving, strings-heavy score which becomes omnipresent, regardless of what’s going on onscreen, also hamper the film. Eventually, the sluggish pace established in the editing phase by Kim Sun-min serves as a painful reminder that this could have made for a good short film rather than a pretentious, uneventful feature-length movie.

In fact, all these afore-mentioned “mandatory art house elements” seem to have been frivolously added to the mix in order to draw attention from selection committees and juries, rather than representing any kind of auteur vision. We also get the impression that, with The Moon Is a Father of Mine, Ovashvili is trying hard to regain the status he enjoyed after his first two feature films, The Other Bank (2009) and Corn Island (2014). It’s possible that there’s more to it, but ultimately the movie is written in a coded language only accessible to certain viewers. In this sense, the opening card informing us that we’re about to watch a true story, and the closing explanation that these events were followed by the Georgian Civil War, feel more like an attempt to wrap things up than a loose metaphor on freedom and self-sufficiency, the necessity of patriotism, or the importance of family roots.

A Film a Week - Light Falls

 previously published on Cineuropa

As a cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael is one of the most influential professionals in Hollywood. In his 35-year career, he was nominated for an Oscar twice (for his work on Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7), and he lensed more than 50 more features, including 3:10 to Yuma, Million Dollar Hotel, Ford vs. Ferrari and this year’s blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Papamichael has also tried his luck directing films already, both in the US and in his native Greece, but his previous four efforts could not be deemed successful neither with critics nor with audiences. His fifth directorial attempt, Light Falls, has just premiered in the Critics’ Picks section of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Genre-wise, Light Falls could be described as an unpleasant thriller that starts in a different register, as a socially observant drama. We get to follow two sets of characters coming from opposite worlds. Clara (up-and-coming Georgian-American actress Elensio) and Ella (Nini Nebieridze in her first adult screen role) are a couple of Georgian-American tourists that come to an unnamed Greek island for a vacation, to relax and enjoy. On the other hand, brothers Eddy (Juxhin Plovishti) and Altin (Jurgen Marku) along with their cousin Veton (Silvio Goskova) are down on their luck Albanian migrant workers who reside on the island illegally. Those are the guys that would be denied entrance to the club by the bouncer, unable to do nothing about it. On top of that, Veton is regularly harassed by a police officer (Makis Papadimitriou, solid as expected).

The two groups encounter one another in a seemingly abandoned hotel on the hill overlooking the town. It was Clara’s idea to visit the structure, and Ella’s to take the photos of her model girlfriend in it, but their adventure abruptly ends when Ella accidentally falls down the empty elevator shaft. Because the building is squatted by several groups of Albanian part-time workers, Clara encounters the trio while on her quest to save Ella. The language barrier leads to miscommunication, followed by a gruesomely violent act of rape, then retribution.

Rape and revenge, this thriller sub-genre that leans towards horror, is actually very sensitive, making it a difficult to execute in an ethical way. However, the source script by Sven Dagones is simplistic, relegating the characters to usually offensive stereotypes: the young women are presented as arrogant, self-indulging tourists, while the trio of workers are pictured as short-tempered, impulsive savages unable to control their urges, deal with their frustration, or act according to universal norms of ethics. Although Papamichael probably had other things (such as otherness) in mind, the script does not allow its characters — with the exception of the policeman — to act like intelligent human beings. The excessive violence does not feel justified and more cynical viewers could read elements of the plot and characterisation as acts of casual racism.

Craft-wise, Light Falls is a deftly made piece of genre cinema. The camerawork by the director together with Akis Konstantakopoulos is attractive and evocative, the contrasts in lighting are sublime and the soundscape of the film is memorable, thanks both to Nick Athens’ music and the sound design. It’s a shame the insensitive script and the director’s inability or refusal to overturn it seal the fate of the film.

A Film a Week - Patient No. 1 / Patsient #1

 previously published on Cineuropa

The early-to-mid 80s in the former Soviet Union were known as “the time of state funerals,” given that party leaders and heads of state were dying in quick succession one after another. They were old when they “inherited” power and were basically the tools of a system that was running on fumes and powered by inertia. Georgian filmmaker Rezo Gigineishvili takes us back to that period of time with his newest feature Patient #1, which has just opened the official competition of this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

When we meet our protagonist, a nurse named Sasha (Olga Makeeva), her primary concern is to prepare her singing act for the nurses’ ball that is about to take place in the hospital. Out of the blue, she is selected, interviewed by a high-ranking party member (Igor Chernevich) and approved to become the primary nurse who discreetly takes care of a very special patient. That patient is none other than the Secretary General (Aleksandr Filipenko), a man in such ill health that he can barely support his vital functions, but one who still believes that he has real power.

At first, it seems like a job like any other, for which Sasha’s special skills of being discreet, polite and unobtrusive come in handy. But the situation is way more complex for her, for the hospital, for the Party and for the whole state. Simply put, different players have different requests, political and personal, for the Secretary General whose mind is not quite sound, and most of them see Sasha as the designated channel of communication. She has no other option than to try to balance different powers greater than herself, and she cannot take any rest. The questions are “why?” and “for how long?”, and the answer may lie in the motto that power is never to be given, but always to be taken.

Rezo Gigineishvili has made a career directing commercials, music videos and Russian-language repertoire romantic comedies before achieving notoriety on the film festival circuit with the based-on-true-events Georgian-language film Hostages in 2017. That film was similarly set in the 1980s and likewise dealt with a system running on its own inertia, through the story of a futile attempt by a group of young, West-leaning intellectuals to escape by hatching a plan to hijack a plane. With Patient #1, the period is the same, but the mood is even gloomier. There is no youthful enthusiasm or dreams of escape, and even when Sasha manages to sneak away for the night to blow off some steam at a dance party, the Party has no trouble finding her.

Gigineishvili masterfully commands the sombre mood. The narrow aspect ratio, the desaturated colours of the interiors and the brutalist angular buildings in the rare exterior shots make the point on their own, as do the contrasts between the usually static shots that depict the reality and the hand-held ones that show the darkly dreamy, almost nightmarish insights into the mind of a person who thinks that he still has power. The mood is further coloured by Giya Kancheli’s score which moves from a minimalist, almost atonal palette at the beginning, towards the neoclassical, before finally ending in the rock realm.

The performances are also inspired throughout. There is more than a drop of Jessica Chastain in Olga Makeeva’s interpretation of Sasha, which comes handy for the interplay with the rest of the ensemble. Veteran actor Aleksandr Filipenko proves to be a perfect choice to portray both the fragility and the conviction of a dying party leader, while one scene is enough for Inna Churikova, playing his wife, to deliver an acting masterclass in her final big screen role.

Deliberately slow-paced to communicate a sense of gravity, Patient #1 serves as an evocative reminder of bygone times. As such, it is also a potent comment of our current times which also run on fumes and inertia.