Beginning Review

Here is actually the much-admired feature introduction of Georgian manager Dea Kulumbegashvili, a part of the official choice for the past year's penalizing Cannes movie festival, in which it could have been a shock-cinema speaking point had the occasion gone . It's co-produced from the Mexican film-maker Carlos Reygadas, whose influence is quite clear, and the film as a whole is a intensely, really overbearingly, curated and controlled encounter. It's a series of disquieting tableaux, taken largely from fixed camera places where the appropriate action can be occurring very far away, and among those speakers may be off-camera for extended periods: a theater in the high fashion of Haneke, Farhadi and Kiarostami.

Every time a spiritual meeting is firebombed by bigoted locals, David creates a formal complaint to the (both bigoted) authorities about their marked absence of work or interest in finding the offenders, also makes a visit to Tbilisi to discuss things with community elders.

The fundamental rape scene is quite disturbingly shot and there's also what I acknowledge is a powerful closing order, imagining some sort of retribution or spiritual degradation occurring to the assailant in geological time. But there's something inert and honestly shallow in the movie: a refrigerated mannerism where rape and spiritual beliefs are equally sorts of arthouse artefact, not created any more real or persuasive from the tips of Yana's own ambiguous attitude to what's just occurred.

Kulumbegashvili's design is convinced, if derivative. Her technique currently has to evolve from these self-conscious affects