Emerging Georgian film-maker Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze earned warm reviews for his excellent debut feature, the tragicomic state-of-the-nation parable Otar’s Death (2021), which picked up the first of several prizes at its Karlovy Vary festival premiere last year. Following a quick turn-around shoot under Covid conditions, Bliadze is back at KVIFF again with his follow-up project, A Room of My Own, a more modestly scaled chamber drama with a worthy message about women liberating themselves from stifling sexist tradition. The title’s evocation of Virginia Woolf’s epochal 1929 proto-feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own, is surely intentional.
Co-writing the screenplay with his lead actor Tamar “Taki” Mumladze, who also co-starred in Otar’s Death, Bliadze works in a more naturalistic register this time around. The female-led story features domestic violence, recreational drugs and brief but fairly explicit lesbian sex. Which is pretty unremarkable for a festival film but potentially scandalous in a religiously conservative county like Georgia, where gay-friendly dramas like And Then We Danced (2019) meet with angry street protests. A Room of My Own is charming and well-intentioned, with sure appeal to festivals with LGBT-themed programs. But it will not deliver much dramatic bite in more liberal countries, where infidelity, drugs and same-sex attraction have much less taboo value.
A recently divorced country girl still finding her feet in the big city, the film’s 24-year-old heroine Tina (Mumladze) is a fish out of water in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, where she hopes to settle down with her new lover. The reason for Tina’s impoverished state and nervy manner slowly come into focus as Bliadze and Mumladze shade in her back story as a young woman fleeing a failed marriage and a violent, abusive husband. As in Otar’s Death, Mumladze is a magnetic screen presence here, her face seething with hidden pain and barely contained rage, usually at weak and unreliable men.
Tina’s first faltering steps to the happy future she craves entail moving into a shared rental apartment with Megi (Mariam Khundadze), a hedonistic hipster whose life revolves around drugs, clubs and bohemian parties. Initially frosty towards her unworldly new house-mate, Megi gradually warms to her, developing a protective empathy that slowly takes on a sexual dimension. She may be queen of the Tblisi scene, but Georgia is still way too straight for Megi, who is the final stages of planning her escape to freedom in New York City. “I can’t wait to leave this f*cking country,” she scowls, “everything is shit here.”
Megi may well be directly speaking for the film-makers here. The dramatic backdrop to A Room of My Own is extremely contemporary, with Covid funerals and face masks, smartphones and techno clubs featuring prominently, but the conservative social values depicted here seem to be stuck in a previous century. Trained from an early age to prepare for a life as a dutiful wife and mother, Tina has never had a job, so struggles to survive with no money and her lowly social status. Despite being the victim of domestic violence, she is widely shunned by family and friends for leaving her husband, and even deemed deserving of punishment for infidelity. “You ruined my son’s life, you slut!” screams her former mother-in-law during a heated telephone conversation.
A Room of My Own is a solidly made, well-acted exercise in light-touch protest drama. “With this film, I want to fight alongside women and make people reconsider their point of view,” Bliadze declares in his Karlovy Vary press notes, with Mumladze adding “we still need to fight to have our own lives without male influence, without the male gaze.” These are unarguably worthy sentiments, backed up by committed, emotionally raw performances. But the strong cinematic voice that Bliadze displayed in Otar’s Death, with its sustained tone of sardonic irony, panoramic visuals and juicy ensemble cast, feels disappointingly muted here.
Venue: Karlovy Cary Film Festival (Crystal Globe competition)
Director, editor: Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze
Screenplay: Taki Mumladze, Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze
Cast: Taki Mumladze, Mariam Khundadze, Sophio Zeragia, Lashao Gabunia, Giorgi Tsereteli
Cinematography: Dimitri Dekanosidze
Music: Beka Ungiadze
Producers: Eva Blondiau, Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze, Elmar Imanov, Christine Bürger
Production companies: Maisis Peri (Georgia), Color of May (Germany)
World sales: Color of May
In Georgian
107 minutes
