Otar’s Death

Otaris sikvdili

Maisis Peri

VERDICT: Georgian director Ioseb Bliadze's prize-winning debut feature is a compelling mix of family farce and tragicomic drama.

Cinema from the post-Soviet republic of Georgia has consistently punched above its weight over the last decade, winning festival prizes and warm reviews across the globe. The latest young contender to surf this emerging new wave is Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze, who makes his highly assured feature debut with Otar’s Death, a fractious family drama with breathless thriller elements and a deep streak of black comedy. Partly inspired by real events, Bliadze’s screenplay elevates personal tragedy into a sardonic state-of-the-nation commentary.

The central plot event signalled in the title of Otar’s Death is fairly marginal to the story, but it serves to detonate long-buried tensions between mothers and sons, town and country, tradition and modernity. Awarded the Fedeora critics’ prize at Karlovy Vary Film Festival in August, this Georgia-Germany-Lithuania co-production is emphatically Georgian in texture, but it is also a refreshingly contemporary and universal snapshot of a culturally vibrant nation on the edge of Europe that is usually depicted on screen through a fog of ancient folklore and war-torn history.

Nika (Iva Kimeridze) is a sullen 16-year-old schoolboy in the early stages of an awkward adolescent romance with classmate Ana (Taki Mumladze). Nika lives in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi with his single mother Keti (Nutsa Kukhianidze), a late-thirties livewire who tries not to let parenthood and poverty cramp her clubbing, boozing and partying lifestyle. After shaking off a hangover to grudgingly take her son on a promised day trip to a swimming lake outside the city, Keti hooks up with some bohemian friends and leaves the boy alone for hours. As evening falls, Nika loses patience and illegally gets behind the wheel to drive back to Tbilisi alone. But resentful family farce turns to tragedy on a poorly lit country road when he accidentally runs into an 82-year-old man, Otar (Marlen Egutia).

The victim’s bloodthirsty grandson Oto (Archil Makalatia) rips Nika from his car and begins beating him. But cooler, more calculating heads soon prevail. After a local doctor and police officer pronounce Otar dead, his middle-aged music-teacher daughter Tamara (Eka Chavleishvili) spots a way of turning a crisis into an opportunity. She offers Keti a Faustian deal: if she returns within 24 hours with hush money of 30,000 Lari, the family will report Otar’s death as a heart attack and drop any legal charges. After years locked in a patriarchal family prison of her own, Tamara seizes on her father’s death as her belated chance of escape to the big city, like a modern-day Chekhov heroine. Incidentally, that pay-off adds up to a little over 8000 Euros, which may not sound much, but it equates to more than twice the average annual wage in Georgia.

In the nerve-jangling hours that follow, an increasingly desperate Keti roams Tbilisi fruitlessly seeking financial favours from incredulous banks, suspicious friends, frosty relations and even her estranged ex-con old flame Zaza (Vakho Chachanidze). A numbed Nika, meanwhile, goes on a disastrous cable-car date with Ana during which his guilt-wracked self-loathing takes a dark turn into attempted sexual assault, an uncomfortably raw scene that Bliadze captures in a lingering, claustrophic single shot. In its final act, Otar’s Death is full of wild swerves, both comic and tragic, with pent-up layers of family tension culminating in cathartic bonfires and brutal assaults. An audacious late plot twist alters the tone of the film considerably, but not the revealing layers of psychodrama that have surfaced in the interim.

Because Otar’s Death is a first feature, some of its tonal slippage and fuzzy narrative threads may be accidental rather than intentional. But overall, Bliadze and his team shoot with a confidence and maturity far beyond most debuts. The plot dances along with great economy and minimal exposition, making strong use of wordless facial expressions and fragmentary dialogue that never says more than required. The cast are also uniformly excellent, with unusually subtle performances from the younger co-stars. Special credit goes to theatre veteran Chavleishvili, making her film debut, whose strikingly handsome features and glowering inner intensity would be at home on a Fellini set half a century ago. But the main emotional heat source here is Kukhianidze, whose spiky, loose-cannon energy fills the screen with thrilling electrical static.

As an audio-visual package, Otar’s Death feels polished and crisp. Co-writer Elmar Imanov’s editing has a lyricism bordering on the musical, counterpointing prickly dramatic scenes with contemplative cutaways to lakeside landscapes and sleepy rustic close-ups. Cinematographer Dimitri Dekanosidze favours measured, static, middle-distance shots, framing characters in symmetrical compositions like a grungy Caucasian cousin of Wes Anderson. A sense-blitzing nightclub scene ablaze with lurid neon colours, sinister costumes and latent violence has some of the nightmarish beauty of a Gaspar Noe disco bloodbath. Judging by this impressive debut, Bliadze is a rising star of Georgian cinema and possibly beyond.

Director: Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze
Screenplay: Elmar Imanov, Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze
Cast: Nutsa Kukhianidze, Iva Kimeridze, Eka Chavleishvili, Achi Makalatia, Marlen Egutia, Taki Mumladze
Producer: Eva Blondiau
Cinematography: Dimitri Dekanosidze
Editing: Elmar Imanov
Art director: Bacho Makharadze
Music: Domas Strupinskas
Production: Maisis Peri (Georgia), Color of May (Germany), Studio Artizm (Georgia), M-Films (Lithuania)
World sales: The Yellow Affair, Helsinki
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (East of the West Competition)
In Georgian

105 minutes