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hIt’s an incredibly tender story of loneliness and love that starts with a bigger bang than most thrillers. Etero, played by Eka Chavleishvili, is a single, middle-aged woman in a remote Georgian village who walks along a steep ravine and gathers blackberries for the sweets she likes to bake. She looks up, stunned by the beauty of a blackbird, having, we may be invited to assume, only been waiting for that moment to arrive—when she loses her footing and disappears from the frame; director Elene Naveriani switches the point of view to something horrifying and stunning: straight to a near-death experience.
Etero sees his own corpse in a parallel universe of his own stricken imagination, but this heart-stopping near-mistake, along with the unwanted new symptoms of what appears to be menopause, coincide with what could be a whole new life. While blithely tending to the family store, Etero receives supplies from flirtatious new delivery driver Murman, played by Temiko Chichinadze, and soon she’s having a gloriously passionate, sensual and thrillingly secret affair with the man. And in the long stretches of solitude while he’s away, now filled with glorious wonder instead of dullness, the film shows how Etero must now come to grips with the paradox that what has ended is not her life, but her 48 long years of virginity. Her life has not been easy. She desperately missed her late mother, who died of cancer when she was just three months old. But now her life paid off with a miracle.
Naveriani’s film, adapted from a 2020 novel by Georgian writer and activist Tamta Melashvili, has a cool and even rather deadpan confidence that shows the influence of Aki Kaurismaki or Elia Suleiman. The characters sometimes hold each other’s (and the camera’s) gaze firmly – but Naveriani insists on something more real and more naturalistic. It’s a movie that tells us what most movies manage to ignore: love and sex aren’t just for the pretty, the sexy, and the young. It’s a tender, sensual gem of a film.
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