Review: April

Director:  Dea Kulumbegashvili

Stars:  Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze

Dea Kulumbegasvhili’s remarkably assured debut Beginning depicted religious persecution in her native Georgia through a specific lens. In that film, a middle class woman is harassed by the male detective investigating her complaint, culminating in a sternly detached rape sequence that has further collateral damage at the end of the picture. Dea evidences the toll of patriarchal oppression in her native Georgia. How it contaminates and exacerbates existing political stresses. Beginning marked Dea out as a major new talent. Her second feature, April, confirms her as one of the most fearsome and fearless talents to have emerged this decade.

As the title implicates, it is Spring in Georgia. A deluge of rain falls before we are confronted with real footage of a natural birth via Dea’s established, unblinking gaze. But there are complications and we learn after that the premature baby did not survive. OB-GYN Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is brought before her (male) peers – former lover David (Kakha Kintsurashvili) and the hospital’s head physician (Merab Ninidze) – for an enquiry into what occurred. In spite of her otherwise spotless record Nina’s job is on the line, though this may be just the excuse the hospital has been waiting for. It is an open secret that Nina performs unsanctioned abortions in the surrounding towns and villages. The procedure is illegal in Georgia but, as Nina contends, “someone has to do it”.

As April progresses we come to understand the regressive cultural attitudes to abortion; the danger is not only in the procedure, but in the threat of community retribution should the secret leak. Dea is picking – and picking roughly – at indoctrinated values that perpetuate a climate of fear. Her methods of communicating that fear are incredibly focused and effective. In her guarded personal life – which we often experience in extended POV shots shorn of context – Nina is prone to cruising the country highways at night in search of anonymous sexual encounters. The air in these scenes is fraught with a prickling sense of danger. Dea’s camera never judges Nina, but her nerve makes us afraid for her, and makes us question the source of said fear.

At other times – and in a move that connects April, spiritually, to both Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Carlos Reygadas’ experimental Post Tenebras Lux – Nina appears as a kind of monster or alien. Humanoid but not human. A thing. We are asked to understand her ‘otherness’ in the community, how she may view herself even. In the back half of the picture there is a tender love scene in which David embraces this ‘monster’; an act of acceptance like an oasis in the film. We worry it might be a mirage.

There’s a subtle evolution in form from Dea here. Beginning was typified by long-held, static shots, imbued throughout with a sense of absolute control. The same emphasis appears to be manifesting here, but while April feels just as focused, it’s as though the camera has been detached from it’s tripod. There’s a handheld quality this time that brings its own sense of almost subliminal risk. The camera is ‘still’, but it teeters. The imperfection brings a new energy with it that matches the sense of elliptical hazard felt in nearly every frame.

The sense of permanent danger that exists in April extends to the frankly astonishing ways in which Dea looks at nature. Fields of flowers in bloom or cows with their calves further the season’s spirit of fertility, but when her attention is turned to gathering storms, one can sense the electricity in the air. As previously Dea doesn’t over-score her work (there is some exemplary music from Matthew Herbert here, but it is kept to the margins). Instead she weaponises the quietude either for unease or for rapt reverence at the power of nature. In one mesmerising shot captured, it seems, during a real lightning storm, the camera lifts into the air. A crane or drone shot which, given the circumstances, feels bold, even reckless. The filmmaking itself feels dangerous.

These additions in the margins help personalise and diffuse a potentially suffocating character study. April might have been too grim were it not for the delicately judged elements that expand the scope and feeling of the picture. Underpinning all of it is a palpable sense of indignation at a broken system. Just as we leave the enquiry into Nina’s actions before a final verdict has been drawn, so April refuses to fully condemn or outright condone its protagonist. But this is not an act of apathy. We’re made profoundly aware of the fallout of Nina’s vocation, while she herself shrugs off any notion of heroism in that same, frank acquiescence “someone has to do it”. We understand that, to a certain extent, the climate has cornered her. An ecosystem of hate and control.

As with Beginning, Dea ends with her boldest, most painterly shot; a vista that looks magical, gaudy, postcard-like, even collaged. And, at it’s base, in the foreground, Nina’s alien form struggling for a footing in a dark mire. A fixed, emotionally moving image that acts as a brooding coda to the whole.

I can count, on one hand probably, the number of films I’ve see in a cinema that have grabbed me as forcefully as this one. Where I’ve reached a brief moment of awareness outside of the picture during it’s running time, enough to crystalise the thought “this is a masterpiece”. While it’s as dark and difficult a picture as I’ve ever encountered in such a space, April is assured a place on that list. Dea Kulumbegshavili might be the best out there right now.