‘April’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Dea Kulumbegashvili. Georgia. 2024. 134mins

An ob-gyn specialist in a small hospital in provincial Georgia, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is devoted to her job on the expense of all the things else. However she additionally dangers her profession by covertly offering companies to girls that transcend the remit of her place and, at instances, the regulation. When a new child child dies a number of moments after beginning, Nina finds herself the topic of an investigation that threatens to disclose the extent of her actions. The second function from Dea Kulumbegashvili, April is a formidable, defiantly esoteric work. It calls for appreciable funding from the viewers, however does repay it.

A formidable, defiantly esoteric work

Along with her arresting 2020 debut Starting, which gained quite a few prizes together with  Greatest Movie, Director and Actress at San Sebastian, and now this formally daring and intellectually rigorous follow-up, Kulumbegashvili takes her place alongside among the tougher auteurs of the arthouse spectrum. Its Venice Jury Prize win will solely improve her fame. Like Starting, April (which options Luca Guadagnino amongst its producers) will seemingly draw comparisons to the work of Michael Haneke. However there’s additionally a kinship right here with Johnathan Glazer, significantly Beneath The Pores and skin’s mix of the uncanny and the prosaic, and with the indirect, demanding movies of Angela Schanelec. It’s not a movie that screams break-out business potential, however it is going to seemingly discover receptive audiences at additional festivals – following Venice, it lands in TIFF, London and New York. It also needs to be an image of curiosity for distributors looking out for high quality arthouse titles.

The movie opens with an prolonged sequence that exhibits a monstrous determine: a faceless humanoid form, with pores and skin that hangs off its kind like a half-rotted cadaver, it strikes slowly and painfully by means of what appears like black, oily water. In the meantime, on the soundtrack, we hear the joyful sounds of youngsters at play. The determine is a recurring motif, one thing that haunts the areas that Nina inhabits. We assume it’s a manifestation of her guilt and self-loathing – key to understanding is a narrative she tells a stranger to whom she provides a elevate, and extra – however it’s by no means made overtly clear.

The laughter of joyful kids is simply the primary occasion of how sound is punched up and foregrounded all through. Laboured respiration, the ticking of a clock, the incessant barking of canine, the grinding gears of Nina’s automotive as she drives by means of the evening to are inclined to girls within the mountain villages – it’s all heightened in a manner that takes on a nervy depth, and is all easily combined into the movie’s evocative musical soundscape. The sparse rating is an uneasy, primal factor that sounds prefer it’s performed on bone flutes and bits of lifeless animal, which, on condition that it’s composed by experimental musician Matthew Herbert, could be the case.

As a personality examine of a pushed, devoted lady, the movie prefers to counsel quite than to indicate. A number of key scenes play out completely from Nina’s perspective, which means that her face and her reactions are out of body all through. She is an enigma to us. And he or she is a determine of suspicion to the deeply conservative Orthodox Christian village communities the place she works, a spot the place ladies are routinely married off of their teenagers and a lady’s fundamental operate is to bear offspring. A scene through which Nina walks by means of a hellish nighttime livestock market, previous leering males and distressed, filth-crusted cows, makes that time quite succinctly.

What the movie does make abundantly clear is that it’s not straightforward being a lady like Nina, somebody who adheres to her personal ethical framework however who defies societal and patriarchal norms. In the end, the canine begin circling and the storm clouds collect and one thing, inevitably, has to interrupt.