There’s a moment smack in the middle of Beginning, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s formally astute but callously cruel debut feature film about the combined oppressive forces of religion and patriarchy slowly but surely crushing the spirit of a depressed, devout woman, that threatens to expand not only her worldview but also the film’s. It involves her going to her mother’s house after we see her get brutally raped by an evil man in a static wide shot, its needlessly elongated duration recalling the infamous rape sequence from Gaspar Noé’s aggravating Irréversible. Kulumbegashvili provides no such time for the interaction between mother and daughter, which may as well be the point. Our protagonist, a member of the Jehovah’s Witness community, is defined by the violence committed against her, not her loud or even quiet rebellion against it; seeing other women, like her mother, living a similarly cloistered and repressed existence makes her accept her submissive attitude even more — except when she sees her younger sister, who has only recently become a mother, also follow the same trend. She’s puzzled by her sister’s decision to have a child this early in her life (we’re never explicitly told how old she is; the film implies that the younger sister would have just begun college if not for the birth of her child); she’s disappointed that her sister has left her education for a child whose “father hasn’t realized yet he [even] has a child.”
This feeling of quiet rebellion against patriarchy, briefly ignited by this sequence but largely left unexpressed in Beginning, materializes into something much more mysterious and altogether more potent in Kulumbegashvili’s second feature, April. In a way, it’s almost confrontationally oppositional to her first film’s turgid passivity. Here, our protagonist, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), is most defiantly an active participant: she’s an obstetrician in rural Georgia willing to aid patients seeking abortions despite legal prohibitions against it. Her moral stance, made repeatedly clear throughout April, is that “if it’s not me, it’ll be someone else.” But does she really believe that? Kulumbegashvili consistently contrasts her defiance with her downbeat existence, which, in theory, feels like a natural extension of Beginning’s monotonous miserabilism. Here, however, it doesn’t feel like the director is merely using cruelty as a form of artistic currency; Nina’s seemingly self-imposed isolation and sexual masochism complicate the genuineness of her beliefs. It almost feels like she has internalized the “murderer” tag given to her by those who condemn illegal abortions. So, detachment – from any genuine human connection – becomes her form of self-punishment.
The most impressive aspect of April — which sets it apart from other similarly punishing and horrifying pro-abortion dramas like Vera Drake (2004) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007) — is its aesthetically varied depictions of Nina’s alienation. It’s surprising, too, since Kulumbegashvili could have easily resorted to doubling down on the tried-and-tested aesthetics of the European art film she gained plaudits for in Beginning. April still features that Haneke-styled boxed-in framing whose shot duration can feel punishingly long and unnecessarily emotionally distancing. But, given that our protagonist is much more of an active participant in the film’s drama, it also features movement. Kulumbegashvili and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan signify this formally by switching from static shot compositions to handheld camerawork. They rely on this most in sequences when Nina is traveling away from the hospital’s cold sterility to either perform abortions in a village or engage in her nocturnal sexual adventures-cum-humiliations. The camera not only follows her here, but it embodies her POV, making her appear a bit like Scarlett Johannson in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin: a wandering alien (or ghost) engulfed by unnaturally loud sounds of heavy breathing and entrapped by the beautifully stark Georgian hellscape.
Kulumbegashvili further leans into this lo-fi surrealism in sequences that push April into the realm of an abstract creature feature. Unlike the change in shooting style, there’s no discernable explanation for the radical shift in generic form here. These sequences that bookend the film and pop up unannounced throughout it work as haunting folklorish interludes: otherworldly visions of a future (or past) version of Nina as a monster covered in moldy, decomposing flesh seemingly trying to express her repressed feelings — of guilt, love, and loneliness — through her increasingly decaying body language. Or as the arthouse equivalent of Bollywood musical numbers: an unexpected expression and underlining of every feeling Sukhitashvili’s cryptic performance of Nina otherwise keeps concealed. Whatever the intended rationale — and it may not amount to either of these for different viewers — the critical thing is that Kulumbegashvili’s aesthetic experimentations leave an emotional impression. Nina’s helplessness and isolation — self-imposed, state-enforced, or both — is palpably felt in April, not, as in Beginning, just forensically examined.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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