The Antique

Antikvariati

VERDICT: A troubled, politically entangled premiere in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori has partly overshadowed Rusudan Glurjidze’s wistful Georgian comedy that cleverly targets Georgian-Russian relations.

After her feature debut House of Others (2016), writer-director Rusudan Glurjidze is representing Georgia at the International Oscars for the second time with her new film The Antique (Antikvariati). In a strong year for Georgian festival cinema, which included Levan Akin’s Crossing, George Sikharulidze’s Panopticon and Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, Glurjidze’s gently rambling but dark-edged comedy stands out for its fine craftsmanship and sharply-drawn characters, all underscored by the ever-present shadow cast on the narrative by Russian politics and the overbearing Mr. Putin.

In a cavernous, darkly illuminated St. Petersburg apartment, an eccentric Russian pensioner — who is a bit of an antique himself — cohabits with a young Georgian woman who sells illegally exported Georgian antiques. The story is set in 2006 against the backdrop of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda campaign to discredit the Caucasus country, which resulted in a large-scale deportation of Georgians from Russia, and later an invasion and a war.

The film has been picking up festival momentum after a dismaying false start in Venice, where it was invited to premiere in the autonomous Giornate degli Autori sidebar; then its first screening was blocked by a local judge after a minority coproducer in Russia filed a legal protest over certain politically-charged scenes. The Court of Venice finally allowed the film to be screened at the end of the festival. (Glurjidze tells the story in detail here.)

It all begins in Georgia, where the strapping, happy-go-lucky Lado (Vladimir Daushvili) loads some unmarked crates on a truck and takes off with his uncle for the Russian border. They are well-known at the checkpoint and have no problem getting through it, or driving over the icy winter roads to St. Petersburg, where they offload their cargo in a vast warehouse filled with old furniture and statuary. The place is run by Medea (Salome Demuria), a self-possessed young woman who can’t stand Lado (no reason given, but none really needed) and his lovesick attentions. The real boss lady, however, is hidden from view, keeping an eye on things through a video camera high overhead and barking orders in a petulant voice over a loudspeaker.

One wonders if it’s a family business, because at one point the invisible proprietor gives Medea money to buy herself an apartment. She finds a glorious, enormous place in a princely building overlooking the Neva river, obviously prime real estate. But the selling price is low because the apartment comes occupied by Vadim Vadimich (Sergey Dreyden), the cultured but cantankerous owner. Medea accepts his presence and makes her down payment without batting an eye, in an arrangement that seems more attuned to stimulating high theatrics between two fine actors than it is realistically plausible. Like much of the film, the writing is loose and seems deliberately left open to comic improvisation, sudden changes of humor and fits of rage.

The rules of the contract state that Medea is not allowed to bring visitors to the apartment, but she makes an exception for her insistent lover Lado, and ends up leaving him alone in the apartment. In a farcical sequence of cat and mouse, Lado prowls around the house and breaks Vadim Vadimich’s much-fetishized LP player, on which the old man obsessively listens to opera; then tiptoes from room to room when Vadim unexpectedly returns.

Stealing every scene is Dreyden, who died in 2023 and is fondly remembered as the French aristocrat/guide who time-travels through the Hermitage museum in Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark. He is every inch the disillusioned gentleman in The Antique, adrift in a cold-hearted, indifferent society overrun by riot police. Down to his last rubles, alienated from his family and discarded as a useless old crazy by the police, who find him wandering around in a daze, he gives the film a symbolic focus as part of a more or less civilized world, sadly on its way out.

Demuria, in contrast, is cool and competent modern manager who doesn’t stick at legalities, and she’s smart enough to hide in a closet when the police raid the warehouse. Though Medea is attracted to Vadim’s adult son Peter (Vladimir Vdovichenkov does a good job embodying the typical Russian businessman whose eyes flash dollar signs), there’s a big question mark about how a Russian-Georgian relationship is going to work out, and the film leaves them dangling, without great prospects for the future.

Looming over everything is the not-so-veiled threat of the Russo-Georgian war which is two years in the future, but clearly flashed in the police “monkey hunts” for any Georgian they can catch on the street. Several times news bulletins are heard broadcasting Putin’s voice to the populace while he blames the Georgians for disorder and instability in the Caucasus region. His threats culminate in chilling scenes of a round-up and group deportation aboard military aircraft – a scene that sticks in the memory and which may well have been the source of cold feet for some of the producers.

Though the pace is unhurried, there is much to watch in Gorka Gomez Andreu’s captivating camerawork that depicts wintry St. Peterburg at its whitest and most frozen, alternating with Vadim and Medea’s old-fashioned, lived-in apartment with its Roman bath and spacious rooms of yesteryear, more signs of a disappearing world.

Director, screenwriter: Rusudan Glurjidze
Producers: Zurab Magalashvili, Ta nya Petrik
Cast: Sergey Dreyden, Salome Demuria, Vladimir Daushvili, Vladimir Vdovichenkov
Cinematography: Gorka Gomez Andreu
Production design: Grigol Mikeladze
Costume design: Ana Ninua
Editing: Grigol Palavandishvili
Music: Gia Kancheli
Sound design: Sebastian Tesch
Production companies: Cinetech (Georgia), CInetrain (Switzerland), Whitepoint Digital (Finland), Basis Berlin (Germany)
World sales: MPM Premium
In Russian, Georgian
132 minutes