Georgian director George Sikharulidze’s Tbilisi-set Panopticon, which premiered in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, is a rather unusual beast that takes some time to find its feet. But it comes together into a film as moving as it is surprising, expanding the scope of the typical coming-of-age drama with its wide sweep of ideas, and blending the personal with a bold political imagination. Its relevance to Georgia’s high-profile, ongoing political crisis, and a youth caught between a politically weaponised, ultra-conservative moralism and a more EU-leaning openness, should increase festival interest in this feature debut, which flags Sikharulidze as a new voice with something significant to say, and a singular means of expressing it.
Eighteen-year-old student and footballer Sandro is played by Dato Chachua with a convincing blend of adolescent awkwardness and volatility. From its first sequence of him sitting in close, pent-up proximity on a bus to an attractive young woman, the film is charged with the sexual volatility of teenage male hormones in a way that can feel distinctly uncomfortable. But that’s the point, as Sikharulidze casts a critical eye on a patriarchal cultural that indoctrinates shame, conformity and aggressive machismo into youngsters, in which abstinent self-control is a moral imperative handed down from a very powerful Orthodox Church, and repressed sexual urges manifest in problematic ways.
When Sandro accidentally picks up a USB stick in the locker-room containing assorted clips of porn and rants about the evils of neo-liberalism and multiculturalism, it draws him into the orbit of teammate Lasha (Vakhtang Kedeladze), who it emerges is a member of an ethno-nationalist gang intent on returning traditional values to Georgia. Their after-practice hangouts take a more sinister turn when Lasha invites Sandro to join him and his friends on outings to target and punish Muslim immigrants they suspect of profiting from drugs and licentiousness. The male camaraderie he feels is a means to fill the void left by his father (Malkhaz Abuladze), who has shut himself away in a monastery with the aim of becoming a monk, and has asked Sandro not to distract him from this calling by visiting. Sandro, more desperate to keep a link to his father than find a channel to God, keeps the cluster of religious icons that hang on the living room wall up, recoils from the overtures of his girlfriend Tina (Salome Gelenidze), who sees virginity until marriage as an outmoded concept, and verbally humiliates her friend Lana (Marita Meskhoradze) for earning money as a dancer in an Arab-run club.
Despite grandstanding against perversion, he fantasises obsessively about Lasha’s hairdresser mother, Natalia (played with warmth and magnetic presence by Ia Sukhitashvili, who starred in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s 2020 breakout arthouse hit Beginning). Unbearable inner conflict erupts in frequent nosebleeds. Natalia, for her part, can scarcely remember a time when she was not regarded as a mother, and her bond with Sandro outside the lines of a society in which everyone has a clear role to play, gives her freedom to reconnect with another aspect of herself.
In tight framing, we view people as they are watched, complicit in an exchange of evaluating gazes. Lensed by renowned Romanian D.O.P. Oleg Mutu, the Tbilisi of Panopticon is a city alive with looks, and claustrophobic with judgment and expectation. The film’s title comes from French philosopher Foucault’s ideas about systems of observational control. In Sikharulidze’s Georgia, where every move is scrutinised, it is challenging to turn the visibility of difference into something welcomed. Sandro flirts with radicalism, but his coming-of-page path is ultimately steered by women’s inspired influence. He is slowly switched on to a more sensitive mode of relating through the time he spends with Natalia, Tina and Lana, who each in their own way teach him how to be comfortable in his own body, culminating in a startling and moving final scene. Panopticon, ultimately, is a coming-of-age drama that equates political freedom and democracy with self-acceptance, and the ability to inhabit one’s own skin authentically, without fear.
Director, Screenwriter: George Sikharulidze
Cast: Data Chachua, Vakhtang Kedeladze, Ia Sukhitashvili, Malkhaz Abuladze
Producer: Vladimer Katcharava
Cinematographer: Oleg Mutu
Editing: Giorgia Villa
Music: Chiara Costanza
Sound: Paolo Segat
Production companies: 20 Steps Productions (Georgia), FILMO2 (France), Ombre Rosse Film Production (Italy), Tangaj Production (Romania), Independent Film Project (Georgia)
Sales: 20 Steps Productions
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
In Georgian
95 minutes
