From the first two shots of Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, the Georgian director lets you know that her second film is going to be a *challenge*. Starting with a long, static scene of a minimalist nightmare of a single twisted figure doddering around in a flooded room before transitioning to an equally unmoving sequence of just looking at rain falling in a river, it’s a bold and necessary stall to set out early. Tackling the lives and healthcare of women in rural, conservative Georgia, April is – entirely by design – a miserable experience. Violence both direct and structural is felt in every corner of this glacially paced story, an undeniably effective technique that also had me really wishing that the whole thing would just come to an end as soon as possible.
Our entry point into this bleak world is Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an expert OBGYN who works in the maternity ward of a rural hospital, as well as also providing secret abortions to the women of the village. It’s a clearly numbing routine, one that she breaks up with anonymous sex with men she picks up on the side of the road, but one that threatens to be thrown into flux when one of her deliveries goes wrong, resulting in the first infant mortality she’s faced on her watch. Suddenly she’s under greater scrutiny, and there’s even a threat of police action.
Yet, this inciting incident doesn’t really push with any urgency; it was a freak incident about which Nina could have done very little, a situation understood by friendly fellow doctor David (Kakha Kintsurashvili) and the head of the hospital (Merab Ninidze). Instead, Kulumbegashvili finds her dramas in the day to day miseries of Nina and the women around her, with a running motif of their suffering in the quest to birth a child for their husbands being likened to the cattle market on the edge of the village.
It is undeniably sobering stuff, especially the upsettingly real-looking medical procedures, and April does a very good job of balancing a more dreamlike atmosphere with these visceral flesh-and-blood moments, but the suffering does become unbearable at points. A single-take scene in which Nina performs an abortion on a whimpering deaf-mute teenager that goes on for minutes on end is just horrible, made downright cruel by how that particular story progresses. The point is clear – being a woman in rural Georgia is hideous, and even sorority is in rare supply (the teenager’s mother, who demanded the abortion in the first place, also refuses to supply her daughter with contraception) – but the lethargy with which it’s made is tough to stomach.
Nina herself is a great lead, though, a mess of contradictions and unlikely hope. Though she herself seemingly seeks oblivion, she can be downright heroic to the young women in her care, a kindness she refuses to extend to herself, her self-hatred coming to physical life when Kulumbegashvili and Sukhitashvili let us inside her head. We see her as she sees herself – a decrepit, wheezing, faceless husk, a disturbing vision to match the real horrors (and occasional springtime beauty) found elsewhere. It’s an excellent character study in a rarely-seen part of the world, but the rest of April may just demand more than it gives back.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 