In this year’s diverse line-up of Venice competition titles, there is one that stands out. A film without any predecessors or useful comparison-companions, a truly singular example of a cinematic mystery: Dea Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore feature April. After two shorts at Cannes and a debut (2020’s Beginning) that (to say the least) wowed TIFF, San Sebastian, and NYFF, the Georgian director premiered her newest film on the Lido. Chances are high the risk of presenting something so invigoratingly different will pay off. Not only because April is unique to this line-up, but also because it confirms Kulumbegashvili as an assured visionary unafraid to engage with ambivalence and radical opacity. In other words: a different brand of storyteller.
Like Beginning, April also carries the mark of reality, mediated. The director is inspired by fictionalized stories gleaned from the real world––especially her hometown, a village at the foot of the Caucasus mountains in Georgia and its people. Beginning’s sparse dialogue, long takes, and atmosphere of violence closing in on the main character––a Jehovah Witnesses pastor’s wife played by the new film’s lead, Ia Sukhitashvili––made space thicken and swell, while April breathes. Arseni Khachaturan’s patient, somehow insistent camera uncovers a world that is both familiar and uncanny: a world split between rumbling storms, rainfall, a gorgeous sunset seen from angles almost as low as the grass itself, and a rotting patriarchal society that squashes female independence with its body politics. Nina (Sukhitashvili) is an OBGYN who, despite best efforts, has to report a newborn’s death as the result of a previously unregistered pregnancy. The local woman’s husband demands an investigation, well aware of rumors that Nina performs illegal abortions in the village––something the patriarchy cannot allow.
Nina’s care for her female patients is felt mostly through her perseverance and the fact that she continues to offer secret consultations, contraceptives, and, yes, abortions while risking her livelihood and reputation. As a single woman who is no longer “young” by these societal standards, she makes for an easy target; yet she persists. Her character is not the supportive, talkative doctor you’d expect, nor is she predictable in any other way. Choosing quite the opposite, April decisively wants us to leave all dispositions behind and look at the film afresh––peel down the layers of storytelling and character development until what’s left is the core, impossible to articulate when it has to be felt.
To communicate this feeling, April relies on elements as pure as amplified nature sounds, time passing, the offscreen space, and a mysterious figure with a feminine physique that haunts the frame’s periphery from the very first scene. Its (?) breath is audible. The sharp inhales, shallow breathing, and troubled, loud exhales are heard throughout, making it seem the film itself is sentient. Even when it struggles––and we struggle with it––it’s unmistakably alive in a way cinema seldom is. If I were to guess why watching a film that is so elusive in plot, images, and sound feels so fleshy and real, I would say it’s because of the way it treats metaphor, how it uses cinematic means to resist metaphorizing images where expected. Elements––the aforementioned female figure, or the storm that we see unfold for minutes and minutes of interrupted time––invite some sort of mediated reading, a story ready to be uncovered once the symbolic codes have been deciphered, but there is nothing to decode. Dea Kulumbegashvili has found a way to draw mystery from the literal instead of turning it into metaphor––April’s hypnotism is made possible because everything onscreen is what it looks like, but it is also something more. But never something else, as a metaphor or an allegory would suggest.
Beginning was produced by Carlos Reygadas and April sports Luca Guadagnino’s name under his company Frenesy, but Kulumbegashvili doesn’t need any such clout: her filmmaking is so singular, it speaks for itself. It does, indeed, speak, but the director’s distaste for conventional cinematic language (or any linguistic, semantic, discursive shorthands for that matter) manifests as reinvention.
April premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April is a Mystical Cinematic Revelation first appeared on The Film Stage.
