April

(აპრილი)

dir: Dea Kulumbegashvili

2024

Let me tell you about the next film you’re going to go out of your way to watch. It’s incredibly slow, it’s set in a miserable rural area of Georgia (the country not the American hillbilly southern state), and it’s the bleakest most unflinching character study (of an inscrutable character) who is a celebrated OB/GYN who illegally performs abortions down in the villages for desperate women and children.

If that sounds like a barrel of laughs, read on, fair reader, read on.

There’s no good reason to fuck around talking about this flick: It is super bleak, that’s true, and that’s even well before we get to the subject matter that the flick is ostensibly about. This is a place with very little hope. It is a brutish and chauvinistic rural area (unlike all the other ones world-wide), but it doesn’t have that aura just because of poverty, specifically. It’s a poverty of the soul, the collective soul of the place. Women live in perpetual fear. Not just of bad health care choices or the selfishness of men, but this is a place where if you’re husband doesn’t murder you for finding out you’re on the pill because you don’t want a tenth child, it could be your fathers or brothers who kill you because you somehow did something to bring shame upon the family.

The country of Georgia surely has shitloads of problems, not least of which being that it is again controlled by a puppet regime that takes its marching orders from Putin. But even in the so-called “independent” areas where this flick was secretly filmed, mostly being the regions around Lagodekhi, surrounded as it is by the Caucasus mountains, women have less rights than, um, even women in the Southern state of Georgia, which also outlawed abortions and thinks women having rights is wokeness gone mad.

The second scene of this film is a birth scene, as in an actual scene of a woman giving birth. It’s not special effects, it’s not CGI. Hopefully not in reality, but within the context of the movie, the baby doesn’t survive the delivery.

In the third of 72 very long, extended scenes, the hospital administrator explains to the glowering expectant father that Nina, our main character (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the hospital’s best obstetrician, and it surely wasn’t her fault the infant didn’t survive, but they will do a full inquest to figure out what happened. Once the other people leave the room, leaving the father and Nina alone, he tells her he knows what she does down in the villages, and then spits on her.

Nina is… a complicated character, as depicted. She maintains an inscrutable passivity throughout the movie which belies a nature that seems at odds with her actions and her beliefs. She seems almost determined to destroy herself professionally and personally. In other characters it would be an obligation to adhere to the truth of something that motivates them to do what they do and not lie about it, but in her, I dunno.

She randomly sexually propositions strangers as well, which at least once results in a shocking act of violence. I am not sure what the filmmaker is trying to say about Nina with this element, but if I was going to talk about elements of the film I have difficulty working out, well, this would be the least of it. It’s still something that made me very uncomfortable, as was probably the intent.

The crucial quote for me in the flick is from Nina, talking about what she does, which to be clear is not for money. At one point, being quizzed by a colleague (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who not only happens to be an ex-lover, but who is also heading the enquiry as to whether she committed medical malpractice or not, she deadpan intones “No one wants to do abortions. But someone has to.”

If I were an American, and a conservative/religious one at that, I could interpret large swathes of the film as depicting the horrible burden performing such “evil” practices places upon a person’s soul, that warps and distorts their character because of what they’ve done, what they’re doing. Thankfully, I haven’t endured any severe blows to the head or suffered from severe lead poisoning, so I don’t find that lens appealing or helpful. But it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that the flick is saying something about what living in this country at this time is doing to her, that it must take some toll.

Perhaps the more illuminating, explicit depiction of the national dilemma is when Nina describes (to some random guy she’s picked up in her car) how she and her sister, as children, were forbidden from playing in a certain woodland that had pools and ponds. When her sister gets trapped in the mud, and looks like she might drown, Nina is too afraid to get help, because they’ll get punished for disobeying, she is also too afraid to help her sister, because she doesn’t want to get trapped too, so it’s a no win situation where no matter what she does, something bad will happen.

Sounds a lot like the dilemma facing all the womenfolk of this country what with all its stupid beliefs and dumb customs.

She is called to help a girl, a deaf mute girl, who is pregnant in a time and place where if her father finds out she will be cast out or worse. The child is in no position to become a mother, and yet Nina says to the child’s mother “She has the right to be a mother if she wants.” But this child was raped. The child’s mother, Mzia (Ana Nikolava), is trying to spare the child’s child from a horrible fate, and her child too, of which she has many.

The whole procedure is depicted, and it is no easier a watch than the initial birth scene, nor a scene later on which depicts a caesarean birth. The mother clutches her daughter’s hand, arm as Nina works, whispering to soothe her, as the poor girl cries out with pain, fear, confusion. And even as everything goes well, from Nina’s perspective, who often says, when others tell her someone else could provide these services to the poor instead, that no-one else would be able to do it as safely and professionally as she can, because if something goes wrong these other people might not know what to do in order to save the woman’s / girl’s life, the poor girl’s fate is sealed because she lives in a terrible community filled with terrible men.

It feels like there is no way out, no way to fix things or improve things or help anyone, and yet, one persists. And there is a price to pay.

Throughout the film there are these languorous, strange scenes where a contorted figure slowly walks their way across a scene, or a landscape, or, the first time, in the very first scene, across a watery reflection (which does recall certain scenes from Under the Skin from several years ago). I am... not smart enough to understand what this figure is meant to represent. Some of the times, in some of the scenes I think the figure represents Nina’s exhaustion trying to work and care in this horrible world, other times I thought it was old age, or death, maybe, and then in another scene the twisted, contorted figure is awkwardly hugging her former lover, and apparently gets it on with him, so… I don’t know, but not everything has to be cut and dried.

There are a fair few scenes of driving around in the film, and at one stage the car stops to film an massive, incoming storm. I wondered if this was just opportunistic on the director’s / cinematographer’s behalf, as in, lucky. Like most scenes it goes for longer than you would expect without edits, but it plays a significant role because it forces Nina, who was driving away from her last “visit”, to walk back there when her car gets bogged in the mud.

It’s almost like she wants to be caught. Writer and director Dea Kulumbegashvili is from this area, or at least part of her childhood was spent here, so there is much she is trying to say in her depiction of Nina, and in her depiction of this part of the world. Of course how Nina comes across is as much of a function of the choices made by the central actress, but it’s hard not to think the double bind Nina finds herself in is the bind Dea might find herself in, in relation to how she feels about this place and places just like this. We are not fools: we know a story like this isn’t just depicting the unfairness of life in one place: this story is playing itself out across the world, across places as different as can be, all united in their fear and hatred of women, resulting in laws and customs that treat them as second class citizens.

It’s a remarkable, stultifying, draining, meditative, shocking experience, watching this film. It is all too human, and frightening because of it. I am not sure I’d be able to make myself watch it again, but I will not forget it any time soon. You would certainly think, considering how deliberately slow some of the scenes are, that this comfortably sits in the so-called “slow film” genre, but I think the stylistic technique is pointedly at odds with the urgency of the subject matter. The feeling about time running out, as if life is only going to get harder for all these people, Nina included, pervades everything, and yet something persists outside or alongside of that, something connected to Nature or our natures, that yearns for release.

The camerawork is also something quite distinctive, in that despite there being long scenes uninterrupted with edits, quite often if not always the camera is handheld, and restless. Sometimes the camera, I think, is meant to be Nina, either her or her actual perspective, and other times pointedly not. Yet most of the time we can hear her breathing, as if she’s holding the camera or “is” the camera itself, except when she’s in frame.

And yet many of the scenes filmed are ones in which she’s not present, and isn’t observing anything. Another mystery.

There is also, and this is a weird detail in the sound design, almost the ever-present barking of dogs, most often in the distance, often nearby in driving scenes. Whether the scene is set at the hospital, in the car, in the villages she visits, in the middle of nowhere, dogs are barking. Does it increase the tension, is it meant to be the forces of patriarchy and government always lurking, threatening to attack in the background?

April is bruising, confronting cinema, and definitely not a tourism office sponsored boondoggle meant to entice and delight people to come visit the Caucasus mountains, where all the Caucasians came from originally, one presumes. But it is an existential cri de cœur all the same, since we need to be reminded that if half of a population of people cannot live freely, then none of us can be, really.

8 times working in healthcare anywhere seems like a thankless task out of 10

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“No one wants to do abortions. But someone has to.” - April

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2269890841/