From Georgia in USSR days, Merab Kokochashvili’s best known work. A People’s Artist of the Republic (a mere six features in sixty years; now filming #7), this severe b&w beauty charts the downward trajectory of a burly cattle-raising farmer as land, family & custom drift away. Proud of the generations who worked the valley before him, he’s now being forced out by government decree, off land that’s being repurposed. Mining and the oil seeping into the soil under hoof & feet forcing him out. A phenomenon he’s known about since he was a boy, showing his own son in a haunting scene a secret underground cave filled with mysterious drawings revealed by lighting natural gas leaks that burn near the symbolic etchings. Things equally unsettled at home, with both his wife and his fortune-telling mistress threatening to leave just as his elderly farmhand left. And now his cows are dying, calving stillborn & not producing milk. Depressing as this all sounds, Kokochashvili holds the narrative detail so tightly, you need to pick it apart for yourself while admiring a monumental sense of man & nature in the film’s rhythm & the dense monochrome grain of its striking images. You might not always know exactly what’s going on (is this the mistress or the wife?), but it certainly holds your attention.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Bela Tarr’s final narrative film, THE TURIN HORSE/’11, is like this on steroids. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-torinoi-lo-turin-horse-2011.html
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Farmer Dodo Abashidze is built & looks a lot like Topol as Tevye in FIDDLER ON THE ROOF/’71.
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