Based on 22 stories by Georgian poet and prose writer Giorgi Leonidze, this is a film full of detail: Ertaozi, the father who spends the film searching, first for the 'sacred stone', then the 'golden fish', then the 'magic tree', and who ultimately freezes to death in his quest; the white horse dying amidst a field of poppies (the film's striking opening scene); the shoe flung into the air that 'turns' into a bird-shot in sumptuous brightness (despite the poor quality print in which I viewed it), with a kind of gentle pace that's not so much Tarkovskian-the comparison the film's (very few) English language critics have made-as a gentle stroll through an evocatively-rendered locale, more modest in scope. Sometimes it feel as if there's no through-thread; the film doesn't take its time in the manner of, say, Paradjanov's 'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors', for which it compares in its focus on pre-revolutionary community and its construction round a tragic, poignant pair of doomed young lovers, though its stories are perhaps less freighted with the mythic, archetypal resonance of folk myth. Instead, the patchwork construction creates an atmosphere, a mood, a wealth of incident in which telling detail gently emerges then fades.
The film gradually finds its focus in the portrayal of Marita, the orphaned teenager who returns with her father to live with her grandmother early on, and who serves as the idealised symbol of female innocence and joy, of communion with nature and living things: every thing is alive, she proclaims on a mountainside; the dew is the sweat of the earth; stars and flowers are gifts, expressions of joy. In love with Gedia-whose tenderness towards his dying horse in the opening scene, and who likewise serves as index of lightness, gentleness and care-she's rendered as the impeccably beautiful, the object of the village's gaze, and then of its hatred, Marita is central to the critical turn taken in the film's final sections. Betrothed to the brooding shepherd Shete, whose family are (relatively) monied, Marita is the object of a financial transaction in which patriarchy reasserts itself and the demands of status and order trump those of love and freedom. As one observer notes, the wedding ceremony feels more like a funeral than a wedding-and occurs literally over the corpse of Gedia, knocked dead to the ground in a fight with her betrothed. Shete proceeds to turn Marita's lack of love into an excuse for rage: coldly checking the livestock outside in the true manner of a boss, then smashing the kitchen in a jealous rage as Marita exults over the presence of a bird flying in through the window. During the long winter, Marita reunites with Gedia, who it turns out is alive and cannot stay away. In the climactic scenes, she's punished by being dragged through the village backwards on a donkey while the inhabitants pelt with her mud and stones. Shot in swirling fog and rain, with each member of the village appearing alone or in groups to the accompaniment of electronically-amplified and treated drips, groans and roars, the apparatus of civilisation-houses (however) crumbling, roads, fields, livestock-of the relatively pain-free social life we've witnessed beforehand, are stripped away to reveal the dark heart of patriarchy that binds this community together, ending as Marita collapses dead in the mud. In this parade-the flipside to the forced marriage ceremony-the only ones who speak up in her favour are Nargiza, flirting with everyone and tied to no one; 'Rebel Ioram' the anarchist, causally bludgeoned out of the way with a wooden club; Gedia himself, running out of the midst and shot from an unknown source; while Marita's grandmother (Sesilia Takaishvili), who's calculatingly blessed the union in the first place, wrings her hands in the mud and the make-up-caked Pupula cries out her loneliness, admitting that she made up the entire story of her lost love, killed in wartime, for sympathy.
The village, previously a humorously-rendered hotbed of gossip and humour, constructed around the loneliness and gender imbalance that humour patches over, turns, even, into pleasure, can only maintain this balance, it seems, through an act of collectively-binding violence. In this light, the authoritarianism of the old-style village head, Tstitsikore, superstitious, suspicious of progress, in collusion with the corrupt priest, selling Marita into marriage for, as one character puts it, 'red banknotes', come to seem more than harmlessly eccentric vestiges of a distant past. However much he's ridiculed, Ioram, the club-footed anarchist who presses his ear to the ground to hear the oncoming thunder of the train of revolution, whether running alone down the village's paths, proclaiming a future of social emancipation, or followed by a gaggle of school children who join him in revolutionary song, articulates an impassioned plea for justice: of a world beyond transactional patriarchal arrangements, the invocation of a mythical national past, and superstitious localism, which brings out the potential instead for a holistic relation between people, and between people and environment-Gedia's and Marita's love for animals, their love for each other, even Ertaozi's doomed and in many ways foolish, yet harmless quests for something better, transformative, utopian. The film's epilogue informs us that, on the site of Marita's body, a pomegranate tree has grown up-the sacrificial rite exposing the fact that the wishing tree the characters had sought was in their midst all along, destroyed by their cruelty and adherence to repressive convention: a kind of mystic transformation of an idealised feminine beauty which seeks to reverse the community's own punishment of challenges to patriarchy. Perhaps this switch in register feels tacked on-a kind of transition to the present (complete with image of the ruined house in which Marita lived) which maintains the archaic beliefs of its past ancestor-and perhaps this has to do with the film's not always easy balance of a general realism and a more archetypal folk register, between a kind of rambunctious humour and a more delicately poetic reflectiveness. But the film's preponderance of image, anecdote, incident nonetheless sticks in the mind: traceries of a spider's web caught in light, flowers emerging from the rock, figures from the fog.
The film gradually finds its focus in the portrayal of Marita, the orphaned teenager who returns with her father to live with her grandmother early on, and who serves as the idealised symbol of female innocence and joy, of communion with nature and living things: every thing is alive, she proclaims on a mountainside; the dew is the sweat of the earth; stars and flowers are gifts, expressions of joy. In love with Gedia-whose tenderness towards his dying horse in the opening scene, and who likewise serves as index of lightness, gentleness and care-she's rendered as the impeccably beautiful, the object of the village's gaze, and then of its hatred, Marita is central to the critical turn taken in the film's final sections. Betrothed to the brooding shepherd Shete, whose family are (relatively) monied, Marita is the object of a financial transaction in which patriarchy reasserts itself and the demands of status and order trump those of love and freedom. As one observer notes, the wedding ceremony feels more like a funeral than a wedding-and occurs literally over the corpse of Gedia, knocked dead to the ground in a fight with her betrothed. Shete proceeds to turn Marita's lack of love into an excuse for rage: coldly checking the livestock outside in the true manner of a boss, then smashing the kitchen in a jealous rage as Marita exults over the presence of a bird flying in through the window. During the long winter, Marita reunites with Gedia, who it turns out is alive and cannot stay away. In the climactic scenes, she's punished by being dragged through the village backwards on a donkey while the inhabitants pelt with her mud and stones. Shot in swirling fog and rain, with each member of the village appearing alone or in groups to the accompaniment of electronically-amplified and treated drips, groans and roars, the apparatus of civilisation-houses (however) crumbling, roads, fields, livestock-of the relatively pain-free social life we've witnessed beforehand, are stripped away to reveal the dark heart of patriarchy that binds this community together, ending as Marita collapses dead in the mud. In this parade-the flipside to the forced marriage ceremony-the only ones who speak up in her favour are Nargiza, flirting with everyone and tied to no one; 'Rebel Ioram' the anarchist, causally bludgeoned out of the way with a wooden club; Gedia himself, running out of the midst and shot from an unknown source; while Marita's grandmother (Sesilia Takaishvili), who's calculatingly blessed the union in the first place, wrings her hands in the mud and the make-up-caked Pupula cries out her loneliness, admitting that she made up the entire story of her lost love, killed in wartime, for sympathy.
The village, previously a humorously-rendered hotbed of gossip and humour, constructed around the loneliness and gender imbalance that humour patches over, turns, even, into pleasure, can only maintain this balance, it seems, through an act of collectively-binding violence. In this light, the authoritarianism of the old-style village head, Tstitsikore, superstitious, suspicious of progress, in collusion with the corrupt priest, selling Marita into marriage for, as one character puts it, 'red banknotes', come to seem more than harmlessly eccentric vestiges of a distant past. However much he's ridiculed, Ioram, the club-footed anarchist who presses his ear to the ground to hear the oncoming thunder of the train of revolution, whether running alone down the village's paths, proclaiming a future of social emancipation, or followed by a gaggle of school children who join him in revolutionary song, articulates an impassioned plea for justice: of a world beyond transactional patriarchal arrangements, the invocation of a mythical national past, and superstitious localism, which brings out the potential instead for a holistic relation between people, and between people and environment-Gedia's and Marita's love for animals, their love for each other, even Ertaozi's doomed and in many ways foolish, yet harmless quests for something better, transformative, utopian. The film's epilogue informs us that, on the site of Marita's body, a pomegranate tree has grown up-the sacrificial rite exposing the fact that the wishing tree the characters had sought was in their midst all along, destroyed by their cruelty and adherence to repressive convention: a kind of mystic transformation of an idealised feminine beauty which seeks to reverse the community's own punishment of challenges to patriarchy. Perhaps this switch in register feels tacked on-a kind of transition to the present (complete with image of the ruined house in which Marita lived) which maintains the archaic beliefs of its past ancestor-and perhaps this has to do with the film's not always easy balance of a general realism and a more archetypal folk register, between a kind of rambunctious humour and a more delicately poetic reflectiveness. But the film's preponderance of image, anecdote, incident nonetheless sticks in the mind: traceries of a spider's web caught in light, flowers emerging from the rock, figures from the fog.