Seit Otar fort ist

"Since Otar Left (Depuis qu'Otar est parti...)" deals heartbreakingly humanistically with many of the same political and family issues that "Goodbye, Lenin!" treats for humor -- today's ironic adjustment to capitalism in former U.S.S.R. satellites, the cross-generational responsibilities of those who lived under the Big Lies, and filial love.

With dialogue in French, Georgian, and Russian, debut writer/directer Julie Bertucelli focuses on a Francophile household of an earthy grandmother, mother, and daughter in Georgia and their relationships to the dead, absent, and present men who are satellites in their lives.

While there's reminders of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Last Leaf," not a single character is a cliche or dumb and none of their decisions is predictable. The audience literally holds its breath to see each woman's reactions as their emotional predicaments get more complicated in a weave of their own making.

The actresses, from 21 to 90 years old, brilliantly convey the complex emotional see saw.

A simply beautiful movie that's one of the best of the year.

Three women -- a grandmother, a middle-aged daughter, and a university-student granddaughter, live together, male-less, in Tblisi amid post-Soviet economic collapse. An occasional hard-currency bill shows up in letters from a beloved son/brother/uncle, who has qualified as a physician but is working as a clandestine laborer in Paris. The women snap at each other, manipulate one another, and confront life as best they can, each from her own perspective and unique experience. There is a large apartment filled with treasured bibelots and French books, and the suggestion of a more respectable, Tchekovianly Francophile pre-revolutionary past.

An image, among many arresting ones in the film: during a thunderstorm the power has gone out, as it frequently does in crumbling Georgia along with the water and the gas, and the apartment is lighted by candles, allowing the granddaughter to study and to be bathed in a kind of De La Tour luminescence. Then the storm ends, the power comes on, and the magic effect yields to harsh electric whiteness. The three generations peel off electronically: mother tunes in local radio to Georgian pop, grandmother turns on the black-and-white TV to watch a comfortingly boring Soviet-style newscast on a new dam (for her, order has gone and all is lost), granddaughter pops a rock cassette into her player and continues to study in a room suddenly flooded with a light in which everything seems more banal, including herself. Great stuff.

The dramatic anchor of the film is an extraordinary performance from the ninety-year-old Esther Gorontin. This is anything but a sweet old lady: she is misanthropic, querulous, petulant and willful, and when she and her daughter are not spitting and spatting, she immures herself in self-satisfied nostalgia, muttering in Russian (never Georgian) that things were better under Stalin. The beloved son is yearned for, spoken of and asked about compulsively, something that is ostensibly treated by her daughter as a tolerable quirk of age, to be humored -- but you can tell it hurts. Stalin and Soviet order are long gone, and son Otar's absence (which is far greater than she is supposed to realize) has left the other huge void in her life. The family's Francophilia allows Otar's experiences in Paris (which are shown to have in reality been quite miserable) to be lived via a romanticized vicariousness that is fed by each letter, always in stiff, old-fashioned French.

Language is an issue, both for Georgia and for the cast, since only the striking, Jeanne-Moreauesque Nino Khomasuridze, who plays the mother, is a native Georgian and speaks the language. Gorontin is Polish, but speaks French and Russian, as does the granddaughter Dinara Drukarova, who is faultless as a bright young woman who keeps much inside and, as the absent Otar puts it in a letter, "rounds out the angles" in the family until, as young people do, she suddenly explodes at her mother with all her long-repressed, Hamletian resentment and spite (and, as young people do, does this at the worst possible emotional moment). Drukarova learned some Georgian for the occasion, but Gorontin understandably refused to do so. Writing and managing the script must have been nightmarish, but the way in which the characters switch from Russian to Georgian and back depending on context and interlocutor seems entirely realistic for post-Soviet Georgia, and the use of French as a language of refuge and a bastion of dignity is in this context completely plausible.

The film will no doubt hold special resonance for woman viewers -- the depiction of a universe from which men are kept at a distance, and of the bitter joys of aging and of inter-generational love and tension is all done with heartbreaking accuracy. But Julie Bertucelli's first film is, with a lot of help from the tremendous Gorontin, some kind of masterpiece and should sweep viewers of all genders and generations off their feet.

There is a famous photograph, taken in 1852, of three grieving British queens: dowager Queen Mary, Queen Mother Elizabeth, and the not yet crowned reigning Queen Elizabeth. They are mourning the death of King George VI -- a son, a husband, a father. They are clad in black from head to toe, veils and widow's weeds. They are stony-faced in their own individual grief, yet huddled together to give each other comfort.

"Since Otar Left" is like that: a portrait of three generations of grief, and how a Georgian grandmother, mother, and daughter evolve from handling that grief in their own way, to showing concern for the sadness and loss of the other two women.

Of the three, middle-aged Marina is the most grounded in reality, no-nonsense, down to earth. She worries about the day-to-day things: how to keep body and soul together when her brother Otar dies and is no longer able to supplement the family's income. She worries about her mother's health, staying by her bedside and massaging her feet in a very physical and intimate expression of love and caring. She swallows her pride and borrows money from her erstwhile lover, an antiquities dealer, and even considers selling the leather-bound, gold-stamped volumes of French literature that are her father's legacy.

Young Ada responds differently. At first, she is affected in a practical way: mourning makes it difficult for her to concentrate at school, and the loss of income from her brother causes her to resort to petty theft. But she uses her creativity and imagination, and draws inspiration from the same French literature that Marina wants to sell. Ada reinvents her dead brother and clothes him in the brightness of Paris, City of Lights -- the city to which he emigrated and in which he tragically died.

Elderly Eka seems like a combination of the two. Like Marina, she is tough as nails. An early scene shows Eka relishing a rather large piece of cake, and bristling when Marina helps herself to a forkful. We see that, beneath her outward appearance as a kindly old lady with fine white hair, Eka can be petulant and stubborn. She has an iron will and a spine of steel. When she fails to hear from her son Otar for several months, she takes matters into her own hands and decides to go to Paris to find him. Eventually, she learns the truth that he is dead. We see her grief in her sad eyes and her suddenly tired old body. But then Eka surprises us by rising above her own bereavement and reaching out to those who remain.

"Since Otar Left" is a powerful, touching, heart-rending, yet hopeful film. Its characters transcend the realm of celluloid and screenplay, and emerge as well drawn, fully rounded human beings. In the face of death, they respond with the vitality of life. In the face of despair, they shine as beacons of hope. And in the face of loss, they learn the lesson of love.

Unusual film, in that there is no title role as such, and we never do get to meet Otar. We are transported into the everyday lives of three generations of women - grandmother Eka, her daughter Marina, and granddaughter Ada - in their home in what is the genteel decay of Tblisi in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The scene is set with a clever portrayal of relationships between the three, with the typical small household tensions that normally arise.

But the common favourite in this extended family group is Eka's son, Otar, who is in Paris, making his own way in the world, and regularly contacting those at home by phone and letter. Eka, especially, lives for these contacts from her Otar, so when word reaches the other two that he has been killed in an industrial accident, Marina decides to conceal the fact from her mother and play the lie that he is still alive. Two influencing factors come through regarding that choice of action - firstly, Marina is unsure her mother would survive the shock of hearing of Otar's death, but secondly, we suspect Marina herself is unable to summon the courage to pass on the news. Ada unwillingly agrees to all of this at first, but it becomes an increasing burden on both of them as you would expect. Otar's workmate, Niko, turns up at the Tblisi residence with a suitcase of his personal effects, but Ada manages to convey to him the existence of the lie they are playing before he can reveal Otar's demise in the grandmother's presence. Old Eka is no fool though, and you get the impression she knows all is not as it should be. In a rash moment, she decides to take a trip to France to see her Otar, sells the few family heirlooms of value, and purchases three tickets for them all to travel to Paris. The viewer knows that eventually she will become aware that Otar is dead, but the manner of this, and her reaction towards her daughter and granddaughter, are quite unpredictable and beautiful. It is from here on that she proves to be the tower of strength for the other two. Another nice twist awaits us at the film's conclusion. This is a film full of poignant moments and the stuff of life, and coupled with superb acting by the three attractive women one can only endorse its 2003 Grand Prize at Cannes.

"Since Otar Left" is about three generations of Georgian women (an old women, her daughter, and her granddaughter) who live in austerity in an old flat in Georgia. The grandmother looks forward to letters she receives from her only other offspring, a son Otar, who is working in Paris. When Otar dies unexpectedly, the two younger women intercept the bad news and hatch a plan to keep the letters and the happiness they bring coming to the old woman. As the film develops this meager plot and we watch the women trudge through their mundane daily activities we are unaware of a more significant plot developing before our eyes with both plots culminating suddenly at the film's end.

Those who prefer a steady diet of the usual commercial Hollywood film products will likely find "Since Otar Left" a monotonous film of little consequence. However, those who enjoy the people stories of French cinema with their natural and finely nuanced studies of human nature, this sensitive, plaintive, and charming gem is a fly-on-the-wall look at a slice-of-Georgian-life which should not be missed. (A-)