Competition
Dir. Levan Tutberidze

You must be a football fan to understand how the protagonist, a 38-year-old writer Zaza, managed to make a large scoop. Otherwise his exclamations about sir Alex Fergusson and Jose Alvalade, who owns a stadium in Lisbon, will be gibberish to the viewer. Even more so because Zaza uses it in everyday life. He welcomes the women going to the funeral with the words: “Ah, Sicilian weepers! Let me introduce myself. Gaetano Donizetti! Gaetano, very pleased!” Yes, Zaza won at the football pools, so don’t imagine anything about underground lotteries in Tbilisi. As for the money for the bet, it was borrowed from an old drug dealer, whose fridge will be the convergence point for all the paths in this tangled story with a strong criminal taste a la Guy Ritchie. Having clarified the point about the football pools it would be noble to let the viewer get the pleasure of puzzling out the rest.

We would like to focus on how the filmmakers use the wide screen, which was rare in Georgian cinema even in Soviet times (only Abuladze’z “The Entreaty” comes to mind), while for the cinema of the independent Georgia this is downright extraordinary. When in some country filmmakers start using the wide screen, it means the cinema of this country has gained sufficient momentum. But the pretty dilapidated Tbilisi of the present day is not a very good setting for the wide screen and the director Tutberidze found a witty and probably the only possible way out, using glamorous foreign visual quotations as pieces of the puzzle. They are of such diverse origin, that one can’t help being amazed at the director’s knowledge of cinema. Perhaps that is the origin of the line of dialogue in the movie, which expresses a very sane idea: “When you watch something alone, you become wiser”. For example when during a pause in the rehearsal one of the characters, a ballerina, records Zaza’s favourite song “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” on his cell-phone at his request, she walks across the stage under the flashlights of different colors, which cast colorful patches of light around her silhouette, and comes to a stop under a box, decorated with stucco mouldings and gilt like a temple. This is a direct quotation from the wide-screen musical “Corps-de-ballet” (the item called “Nothing”) which Tutberidze must have surely seen in Soviet cinemas at the time of his own film debut “Nazare’s Last Prayer”. Then characters who do not know each other, enter one and the same house, ring the doorbell, receive no answer and leave, walking further down the street. The camera pans on the first person from the roof, then up again, letting the first depart and the second approach during the same shot, and then pans down again. This is a quotation from the newest cinema. Gaspar Noé for example used this technique to record the wanderings of his characters, including the departing soul, through Tokyo in “Enter the Void”. Tutberidze, the author of the Georgian box-office hit “Trip to Karabakh” could have seen the film in Cannes, for example.

But even more interesting than the use of the new scale, unfamiliar not only to himself, but to the country, was one daring, indecent and, by consequence, immediately alluring association. Having sex with a prostitute in the sauna the gangster Mamuka almost at the moment of orgasm looks at his groin and remembers that the automatic gun which was used to shoot his friend to death today, had a red handle, bent like a banana (there is an immediate cross-cut to the automatic gun, which is currently store in the fridge). When the director’s logic can baffle you to that extent, it is worthwhile to say after the screening that while we were all having a good time, somewhere out there in the world cinema a great original was born!

Alexey Vasiliev