Unas dulces mentiras

"Depuis qu'Otar est parti" is a very personal, I would even say, miniature story about very ordinary people, living in far less than glamorous conditions in faraway Georgia. If you are after that small-scale retrospective type of cinema art, you will enjoy the film because it portrays character development and relationship between three female protagonist very well - with deep insight and savvy.

But apart from being a solid and interesting drama that leads its characters through emotional debris to internal grit and, finally, to some glimpse of hope (for how, read other comments or better watch it), this film signifies for me, a native of the former USSR, a far broader and more intimate picture of the material and emotional decline in post-Soviet countries after the communist collapse.

Deteriorated poor Georgia and emotional confusion of the people was so authentic that I thought the film was shot by a native Georgian (Otar Iosselianni even crossed my mind) and was surprised to learn in the captions that a French director had actually made it. So real and natural was the depiction not only of the Georgian family's life with all those outdated interiors and city landscapes but also of the characters' psychological state, their behavior, their little skirmishes and caring relationship with each other. The film felt like being shot by a true Georgian, who loves and appreciates those quirky ways and habits of her fellow countrymen. The desolate state of mind, entanglement in those little ordinary lies looked also so familiar, reminding of the life in mid-90s Russia and today's reality in many backward provinces and republics of the former USSR.

I guess I should re-think my notion that only native artists can impart authenticity to the portrayal of national character and spirit on screen.

Kudos to Ms Bertucelli for capturing this murky but also hopeful Zeitgeist of the lost epoch!!!

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.

It is very difficult to define this film. In fact, every definition is fake because the essence of words or gestures is ineffable.

Otar may be a type of Godot. The incarnated hope, the symbol of filling or image of any victim.

The three women- variant of Tchekov's "Three sisters".

But the reality is not so easy. In East Europe of Communist era, The Occident was the Heaven in all senses. It was the lost Paradis, the normality, the escape. A part of this wonderful world was shield against the daily nightmare. The fall of Communism was not the solution. Occident is a form of chimera not like education or mentality's result but like the personal treasure.

The film is not a moral lesson or image of ex-Sovietic country in transition to European values. It is not an Andre Makine's page. It is only a short life's story and description of a subtle escape. It is slice of dream's rules, descending in past who remains only present and future.

Esther Gorintin's acting is magnificent. A powerful character with a victim's mask, a fragile grandmother for who the life is not only fight or fear, past memories or sweet desire but a form of world's contemplation.

In fact, Eka is the Ada's image. And Otar's death- solution of interior crisis of every character. The end of life in nostalgic universe.

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.

[See IMDb home page for this film for cast names-they aren't known in the U.S.]

Consistently interesting and often moving, first-time director Julie Bertucelli brings to the screen a sometimes humorous, often sad story about three women - grandmother, mother and daughter - living in Georgia (the Georgia that was part of the USSR). No one is starving here but a workers' paradise it isn't either.

The white-haired grandmother is bent and saddled with a heart problem. Living with her in a small but neat apartment boasting many shelves of French books in fine bindings are her daughter, Marina, widow of a soldier killed in the Soviet Union's Afghanistan debacle, and Ada, a student in her late teens or early twenties. She isn't a great beauty but her sensitive face reflects a growing intelligence and a wide range of feelings. All three speak French fluently and each has an emotional attachment to France. The grandmother boasts that the family managed to hide the tomes from "the Bolsheviks."

Notwithstanding her love of France, grandma pines for the good old days of Stalin where everything currently out of kilter would have been fixed by Uncle Joe. She goes as far as to claim she can prove the dictator never ordered anyone killed. There's a surprisingly large number of older Russians and people from former Soviet republics who still maintain that view today.

Otar is the grandmother's beloved son, a Moscow-trained doctor who left Georgia to work, illegally, in construction in France. Writing or phoning regularly, and occasionally sending money, was his habit until, near the beginning of the film, Marina learns he has been killed in an on-the-job accident.

Marina and Ada grieve intensely by themselves. Marina comes up with the terrific(!) idea to keep the news of Otar's demise from the old lady. Her assumption is that her mother, who lived through The Purges and The Great Patriotic War, would die upon hearing the awful news. Not too hard to imagine the complications that can arise from such a scheme with the risk of disclosure of the truth hanging like a cheap suit. Ada is impressed into writing fulsome letters from Otar which his mother never seems to recognize as bogus, even when looking at them.

Things become more complicated, not surprisingly. This isn't the most original plot ever. But then grandma shocks and amazes Marina and Ada with tickets for a Paris vacation to see Otar.

The trip allows the story to continue to an unexpected, satisfying and very lovely ending (which I won't, of course, reveal).

This film is less about a missing and mourned son than it is about inter-generational dynamics among three women who have a very deep and honest love for each other. And it's also a reminder of how resilient people can be when they must. Ada is torn between two worlds but she isn't neurotic or destructive-she's quietly finding her own way. Marina is resigned to life with a supportive, kind boyfriend who cares for her but who she says she can't love. But she isn't cold or exploitative-she seems like a lot of fun when she's with him. And grandma, her devotion to Stalin notwithstanding, is a rock. A realistic one at that.

I hope to see more from Ms. Bertucelli soon.

9/10