Contemporary Georgian cinema is hard to pin down. Recent years’ most notable examples prove native talent expresses itself in disparate ways. The familiar, coming-of-age sensibilities of Levan Akin’s And Then we Danced and his more recent Crossing are a far cry from Lea Kulumbegashbili’s harrowing Beginning, for example. Alexandre Koberidze’s whimsical What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, whose magical shadings against urban life’s mundane alienation are baked into its foundations, seems in yet another world entirely. Tato Kotetishvili’s Holy Electricity’s brief flashes of eccentricity are less effective and call more attention to themselves than does Koberidze’s film, but it still speaks in a familiar, festival-friendly visual language of long takes, static compositions, and natural, unaffected performances. His characters, however, are the film’s real winning quality, able to draw out subtly moving drama from sometimes unremarkable images, breathing life into the film where it might otherwise feel staid and passionless.
Having found their lives inextricably linked after their brother/father’s death, uncle/nephew duo Bart and Gonga need to find a way to make money. While searching through junkyard scraps for inspiration, they come across a box of metal crosses. They decide to fix strips of neon lights in their hollow recesses, and sell them as glowing manifestations of spiritual power to the denizens of Tbilisi. It’s a smart racket in a city, like many in Eastern Europe, whose religious culture and history seems to have given way to urban secularism. Thanks to the passing interest of one man who saw their first illuminated cross, Bart and Gonga believe the alien glow of their little creations will inspire something deep within the whole population of Tbilisi; soon enough, they have a small community of customers eager to reconnect with the all-knowing.
This isn’t to suggest something sinister is at the heart of Bart and Gonga’s quaint operation. The history of cinema has far more disturbing examples of the power one can wield over people by monetizing the Lord Almighty. Frank Capra’s Miracle Woman saw the public as tragic fools at the whim of con man and his vessel, selling fake miracles to desperate citizens whose worlds had been torn asunder by the Great Depression. If we find ourselves, in the year 2024, at a similar juncture, with life increasingly difficult to live on dwindling sums of money that are fed to those already privileged with vast amounts, it’s hard to blame anyone for seeking solace in a glowing cross — after all, why shouldn’t it work if the normal solutions aren’t? It’s also hard to blame Bart and Gonga for capitalizing on it, and that’s, in part, because no one gets hurt in Holy Electricity; moral retribution is not the aim here, as much it is about identifying the ways people collectively survive hardship.
Even when togetherness is difficult — Bart gambles away his and Gonga’s meager savings, and has creditors chasing him — our parted duo finds connection: Bart to a loving community of trans men and women who live happy lives within their small bubbles, and to whom he introduces Gonga, whose incorruptibly precious face takes in these new and wonderful people with bashful innocence; and Gonga to a scattered crew of seemingly rootless teens, including a young Roma woman who sells coffee on the street, that offer friendship and the hope of something more. But if their faith in hard-won bonds forms the sturdy foundation of Bart’s life, it’s spontaneous community-building that gives him, and Gonga, momentum, and ultimately what makes Gonga the film’s source of hope. When the world has nothing better to do than antagonize, at the heart of Holy Electricity abounds a series of seemingly impossible miracles of communal spirit that seem to trump just about anything a glowing cross could ever conjure.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 2.
