April: Mud, Blood, and Transparent Cinema (*****)

The first scene places the viewer on unsafe terrain, filled with ghosts. Very personal ghosts. It's unclear what we're seeing; nothing is said about her (she looks like a woman), and there are no clues about the role she will play in the story to come. A being (perhaps human, or merely a myth) with its skin scorched moves in an uncharted space between wakefulness and sleep, between darkness and light. It seems that, as Saint John of the Cross maintained, the journey Georgian Dea Kulumbegashvili initially proposes is not so much about seeing as not seeing. The idea is to appeal to the back of consciousness and gaze, where monsters dwell. The following sequence is a birth. And its frontal presentation leaves little room for speculation: everything is visible, everything bleeds, everything is offered so naturally that it becomes flesh on the screen. Flesh that, after a moment of fury, dies.

Let's say the miracle lies in the contrast, in the way those two scenes look at each other, from one side of the gaze and the other. The director of the miracle that was Beginning , the film that won her the Golden Shell at San Sebastián, now insists in her second film with a much more earthly, muddy, and, if you will, transparent story. And harsh, very harsh. The story is simple. After the death of a newborn during childbirth due to the sheer pain of labor, gynecologist Nina finds herself subjected to an inquisitorial scrutiny amid rumors that she performs illegal abortions on those in need.

On a square screen, the protagonist begins her own descent into a shared hell that is very much a flight from herself. The journey takes place through the darkest night of the soul and of Georgia. Nina (superb and profound Ia Sukhitashvili) seeks sex, finds it, rejects it, is rejected. She helps women who know nothing of their subjugated bodies. And all the while, she travels through a perfect abyss that calls for brutality as well as magic, discovery as fear. The images lost in the depths of the retinas embrace each other with the clarity of blood and vomit, of an abortion filmed like never before. That is, from within the conscience, the female conscience that has so often denied itself.

It's impossible not to draw lines of contact between the Georgian director's proposal and the cinema of, for example, Mexican Carlos Reygadas. With the help of a tremendous leading actress, the filmmaker successfully explores the rawest aspects of what is never told: that other side that has less to do with the humiliation of women as a correctable accident of history than with the very structure of a society that has placed its very reason for being on precisely that humiliation. And this applies to everything: from the most banal everyday life to the very roots of medicine in general and gynecology in particular.

The camera lingers on each shot, aware of its ability to reveal what the routine, everyday gaze hides. It's not contemplation, it's revelation. April 's effort isn't discursive. Her idea isn't to recount the suffering of a woman in the midst of oppression. Much more ambitious, her goal is to reach the very structure of the gaze and describe the meaninglessness of every gesture that condones, promotes, and protects ignominy, offense, and fear. This isn't cinema for immediate political action so much as it is for the transformation of everything, starting with the way we see, the way we understand.

In the end, the creature reappears. It's a woman. We already know that. But in truth, she's a grieving ghost placed at the center, as a metaphor and ellipsis, of a colossal film flooded with the blood of two births (the second with the open wound of a cesarean section) and punished by the same blood of an abortion. Seeing is not seeing.

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Director : Dea Kulumbegashvili. Performers : Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze, Roza Kancheishvili. Duration : 134 minutes. Nationality : Georgia.