Here is a marvellously tender story of loneliness and love which begins with a much bigger bang than most thrillers. Etero, performed by Eka Chavleishvili, is a middle-aged single lady in a distant Georgian village who’s out strolling close to a steep ravine, amassing blackberries for the muffins she likes to bake. She seems to be up, transfixed by the fantastic thing about a blackbird – having been, we’re maybe invited to imagine, solely ready for this second to reach – when she loses her footing and disappears from the body; film-maker Elene Naveriani switches the point of view to one thing terrifying and vertiginous: straight right down to a close to dying expertise.
Etero sees her personal corpse in a parallel universe of her personal stricken imagining, however this heartstopping near-miss, along with the unwelcome new signs of what look like menopause, coincide with what might be an entire new lease of life. Whereas listlessly minding the household store, Etero receives some inventory from flirtatious new supply driver Murman, performed by Temiko Chichinadze, and shortly she is having a gloriously passionate, sensual and thrillingly secret affair with this man. And within the lengthy stretches of solitude whereas he’s away, now full of beautiful questioning as an alternative of dullness, the movie exhibits how Etero should now soak up the paradox – what has ended isn’t her life, however her 48 lengthy years of virginity. Her life has not been straightforward. She has desperately missed her late mom, who died of most cancers when she was simply three months previous. However now life has repaid her with a miracle.
Naveriani’s film, tailored from a 2020 novel by the Georgian author and activist Tamta Melashvili, has a cool and even quite deadpan self-assurance which exhibits the affect of Aki Kaurismäki or Elia Suleiman. The characters typically maintain one another’s (and the digicam’s) gaze emphatically – however Naveriani insists on one thing realer and extra naturalistic. It’s a movie which tells us what most movies contrive to disregard: love and intercourse isn’t just for the beautiful and the horny and the younger. This can be a light, sensual gem of a movie.
