April, as is well known, is a rainy month, and never has a visual metaphor come in handier than in the wet, muddy, at times tempestuous film April. It is the second feature from writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili, whose 2020 debut Beginning, told around the firebombing of a Jehovah’s Witness community, became Georgia’s Oscar submission.
Her new story once more begins with a shock, when Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an experienced obstetrician in a provincial hospital, delivers a baby who dies right after its bloody onscreen birth. Under close scrutiny from her colleagues and the police, she courageously weathers the unfolding human and legal fallout and sticks to her guns, insisting she made no mistake. But she has other secrets that the hospital wants to remain hidden, and this incident could be a good excuse to fire her. As we soon discover, she has quietly been performing illegal, unregistered abortions on poor patients living in remote rural areas.
Using a relentless series of long-held, fixed-frame tableaux to shake up narrative normality, Kulumbehashvili brings disorientation and intensity to her portrait of this bold, single-minded medic, ready to sacrifice her job and reputation and maybe her freedom to perform these abortions on desperate country women who have to hide the fact they’re pregnant from their families and community. As Nina speeds down lonely country roads and highways, making her rounds, she seems like a solitary, heroic knight fighting for her patients’ dignity. But the personal price she pays, unflinchingly, is high.
With the camera fixed on an oblong room with a long table in the middle distance, we see Nina visiting a young deaf-mute woman who lives with her married sister and large family. This is not the first time the sister has begged Doctor Nina to end a pregnancy for the mentally fragile girl. When asked about the baby’s father, she pretends not to have any idea how her sister “got out” and became pregnant again, but it’s pretty obvious there is only one man in the house. Later Nina returns to this house and this room to perform the abortion in one long, uncomfortable shot that will have the audience squirming. With the camera carefully cutting off the heads of the girl and her sister, it is as though they were the anonymous subjects of a documentary, and not actors.
In a rather brilliant move, Kulumbehashvili foregoes repeating herself by showing another visit to another patient, and opts for a third trip to the oddly-shaped room dominated by its prominent table. On her way home, Nina has driven into a thunderstorm and her car is stuck on a muddy road. It echoes a horrific story she has told earlier about how, as a child, her sister got stuck in a muddy lake and nearly drowned, while Nina sat on the bank and cried, too terrified to jump in the water and help her. Now she walks through the downpour to the house of her two patients. Eerily, only the older sister is there, serving her husband food on the long table.
Besides her fervent dedication to work as an OB-GYN and abortionist – and inextricable from it – is Nina’s unbalanced emotional makeup. When asked by a married colleague (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who years before was her lover, why she didn’t marry him, she affirms without evidence that their relationship would never have worked out. She also claims she hasn’t had a relationship in the eight intervening years. What she doesn’t say is she seeks sexual gratification, and perhaps humiliation, at the hands of strangers: a hitchhiker she picks up to whom she offers oral sex; a young car wash attendant on a lonely road. The danger of these casual trysts is perhaps what excites her, but their neurotic component is a sad fixture in Nina’s truncated emotional existence.
This incomplete human being could be represented by a recurring figure who appears in various unreal landscapes, often sloshing hesitantly through a viscous liquid like the amniotic fluid surrounding an unborn baby. Adult-size but with a clay-like texture and cocooned features, audibly wheezing and gasping for life, this figure is deliberately puzzling and more than a little repulsive, but stirs some sympathy in its blind stumbling and fear that it will never be an independent, self-sufficient creature.
Although the film’s rigorous insistence on holding shots for minutes on end without moving the camera will not win it wide audiences (there were numerous walk-outs even at the press screening in Venice, where it premiered in the main competition), it does give it a very distinctive look. The cinematography is pleasingly sophisticated, with powerful straight-on shots of one character — or in some cases like driving a car, no character at all. There are some beautiful exteriors from D.P. Arseni Khachaturan, like the ominous movement of a storm cloud over plowed fields with its portent of a tempest. The visuals work hand-in-glove with a constant biologically-themed soundscape of breathing, wheezing and heartbeats, which blend into Matthew Herbert’s mysterious musical compositions.
Director, screenplay: Dea Kulumbegashvili
Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze
Producers: Ilan Amouyal, David Zerat, Luca Guadagnino, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Gabriele Moratti, Alexandra Rossi, Archil Gelovani
Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan
Editing: Jacopo Ramella Pajrin
Production design: Beka Tabukashvili
Costume design: Tornike Kirtadze, Nikolozi Guraspashvili
Music: Matthew Herbert
Sound: Lars Ginzel, Tina Laschke, Zezva Pochkhidze
Production companies: First Picture, Frenesy, Memo Films, Independent Film Project
World Sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Georgian
134 minutes
