Dasatskisi (Beginning) directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili (Georgia , 2020)
Winner of best full-length movie at this year’s Trieste Film Festival, ‘Beginning’ has also been shown, and widely acclaimed, at many other festivals including New York, Toronto (where it premiered in September 2020), and Adelaide.
The praise is merited. There are not enough female directors and fewer still prepared to take the risks Kulumbegashvili does. This is her debut feature film but it already shows her to be a woman who combines originality and courage in her filmmaking style. In one interview she says “plot is for structure, the rest is cinema”, “this film is about looking” and “the more action there is on screen, the more passive the viewer is”.
‘Beginning’ is essentially a character study of an alienated woman Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili ) who is married to David (Rati Oneli), a Jehovah’s Witness leader, and who has a young son Giorgi (Saba Gogichaishvili).
The movie is powerful but not without flaws. At 2 hours and ten minutes, it is a good 20 minutes too long. In the final sections there is a shift of focus to the religious indoctrination of children and we briefly follow the husband’s life. These are superfluous distractions from Yana’s story.
Yana
For the non linear narrative, Kulumbegashvili uses long takes and only makes cuts when strictly necessary. The long opening scene in which a prayer room is fire-bombed required meticulous planning because it needed to be done in one take.
A still more shocking scene involves a violent sexual assault where the horrifying action takes place outdoors and is seen at a distance. You understand the horror of what is going on but the lack of close-ups, or camera movement means that you remain detached and witness the violence as a passer-by might. There’s an element of voyeurism at play here but it’s quite different to the kind you encounter in something like Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’.
One shot of Yana lying among leaves on her back with her eyes closed lasts over six minutes making you wonder if she’s dead or sleeping. Her exact motivation for this stunt (which terrifies her son) remains unclear.
Dea Kulumbegashvili
This woman’s passivity is uncomfortable to watch. Much of the time her movements are like those of a sleepwalker or of someone in a trance. Her stillness/numbness make her an unconventional protagonist. We feel her alienation but her inability or unwillingness to react is infuriating. It introduces the disturbing thought that many women live in this kind of desensitized state.
Kulumbegashvili says the decision to make her so unresponsive was a deliberate one to contrast with traditional plots where the woman stuck in a male-dominated world fight back and stand her ground. The movie shows how patriarchal society functions to stifle her potential.
Yana is not any part of her husband’s decision making process and is at the mercy of a corrupt detective. Her seeming acceptance of this reality is disturbing and shocking but somehow understandable. At one point her husband remonstrates with her and says “I created you”. In a way he is right. He and men like him have contributed to her confusion and her inability to make independent or logical choices.
