Earlier than watching “April,” the brand new film from the Georgian director and screenwriter Dea Kulumbegashvili, I had seen just one different fictional movie that featured an actual childbirth. It was “Staying Vertical” (2016), from the French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie, and though the film was totally steeped within the absurd, the beginning was filmed in a single take that left little doubt about its authenticity. I had additionally seen a couple of films with graphic however clearly simulated scenes of abortion, together with one other French movie, Audrey Diwan’s “Taking place” (2022), and a Ukrainian drama, “The Tribe” (2015), from the director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy. My analysis is admittedly spotty, however the cinema of in-your-face obstetrics has all the time felt like a primarily European art-film phenomenon. Rightly or wrongly, I can’t consider an American film—not even “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Eliza Hittman’s rigorously noticed abortion-themed drama, from 2020—that has subjected both the success or the termination of a being pregnant to such audience-discomfiting scrutiny.
Even on this squirmily confrontational firm, “April” is one thing else. This terribly bleak and devastating work, set in a damp-looking stretch of japanese Georgia, reveals us a simulated abortion, two unsimulated births—one vaginal, one C-section—and, for good measure, the administration of an epidural. Every of those scenes is shot in a single, static take—composed, by the cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan, in an almost sq. side ratio—that refuses to look away till the process is completed. You’re reminded that the important thing to realism isn’t essentially a convincing prosthetic or a well-timed spurt of blood; it’s the load of time itself. By granting these medical interventions their correct period and respect, Kulumbegashvili infuses them with a component of the sacred. That’s true even of the abortion scene: a petrified younger girl, who has been raped by a relative, undergoes the process on her household’s eating desk. (Abortion is authorized within the Republic of Georgia for pregnancies beneath twelve weeks, however it might as effectively not be: the Georgian Orthodox Church’s robust condemnation of abortion dominates public opinion.) The scene is a horrifying tableau, however one in some way transmuted, by the digital camera’s unwavering focus and the physician’s calm, soothing ministrations, into an incongruous imaginative and prescient of grace.
The physician is Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), a extremely expert and devoted ob-gyn specialist in her forties, who has specific experience overseeing sophisticated pregnancies and troublesome deliveries. The movie, which unfolds over a couple of chilly weeks in April, 2023, is ready in movement by a uncommon tragic consequence: Nina delivers a child who, after a couple of minutes, is pronounced useless. The daddy (Sandro Kalandadze), grieving and enraged, accuses her of getting killed the kid intentionally, an accusation born of a monstrous conflation; phrase has unfold of the abortions Nina performs within the village. An in depth medical colleague, David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), listening to of the abortions, warns Nina to cease, for the sake of her profession: “Nobody will thanks, and nobody will defend you.”
David, because it occurs, has been requested to supervise a hospital investigation into the stillbirth, though Nina has already calmly and appropriately recognized the explanation it occurred: the being pregnant was by no means disclosed, and so the mom (Tosia Doloiani) acquired no prenatal care, leaving any potential misery indicators to be found, too late, throughout labor. Unreported pregnancies, the movie suggests, are usually not distinctive on this a part of the nation, the place younger ladies are pressured into marriage and procreation early on. Contraception is scarcely much less frowned upon than abortion. In a single outstanding scene, Nina meets with a teen-age newlywed who’s terrified to even admit that she isn’t prepared for motherhood; Nina slips her a packet of birth-control drugs, warning her to inform nobody. Neither girl’s voice rises above a whisper, and but we hold on their each phrase, and on the conspiratorial intimacy cast by the digital camera. Its silent watchfulness seems like a promise, as if the movie itself had been imposing the seal of the confessional.
Kulumbegashvili made her characteristic début with the aptly titled “Starting” (2020), a drama set in a distant neighborhood of Jehovah’s Witnesses who’re experiencing violent assaults by extremists within the surrounding Orthodox majority. Sukhitashvili starred in that movie, too; she performs Yana, a preacher’s spouse, who progressively comprehends—and begins to push again in opposition to—the spiritual and patriarchal jail that has been constructed round her and the opposite ladies in her midst. It might be troublesome to think about two movies extra fastidiously designed to perform as companion items than “Starting” and “April,” each of which draw on the identical deliberate, contemplative stylistic effectively and are constructed on excessive contrasts of human expertise. In every of those movies, cruelty commingles with tenderness, and hideous acts happen in opposition to backdrops of typically gorgeous pure magnificence. Sukhitashvili magnetizes the digital camera with a fierce if soft-spoken intelligence—a top quality of reserve that nonetheless propels her protagonists boldly ahead, into private odysseys rife with religious torment and sexual violence.
On a minimum of one event in “April,” Nina appears to ask such violence, with a fearless information of what it would entail. On nights when she isn’t at dwelling or on the hospital, she ventures out in her automobile and picks up strangers for intercourse, for causes that appear to increase past the short gratification of a bodily urge. At occasions, I questioned if Nina had been making an attempt, on some degree, to realize an ever extra radical empathy together with her least lucky sufferers, to topic herself to the tough, loveless, and altogether wretched excuses for bodily intimacy that introduced a few of these ladies to her examination room within the first place. The necessity to strengthen one’s compassion, and forged apart all concern, seems to be of essential significance. Early on, driving round with a possible hookup, Nina recounts a haunting reminiscence from childhood, when she was too younger—and too paralyzed by fright—to intervene in a matter of life and loss of life. It’s the one second when Kulumbegashvili comes near laying Nina’s psychological playing cards on the desk.
Fittingly, “April” itself has been structured as a type of examination—an investigation into stark realities and regressive attitudes which are neither new nor, after all, distinctive to anyone a part of the world. Kulumbegashvili’s gaze is by turns coolly diagnostic and furiously exploratory, a dichotomy that manifests itself within the compositional extremes of Khachaturan’s cinematography. Inside areas, like an empty hospital hall the place Nina awaits unhealthy information, are typically statically and symmetrically framed, an aesthetic choice that, on this setting, would possibly evoke a sterile, scientific detachment. However Nina’s method together with her sufferers isn’t sterile, and her concern for his or her well-being is the alternative of indifferent. Repeatedly, Kulumbegashvili yanks us abruptly out and in of her protagonist’s consciousness: each time the digital camera heads outdoor, it abruptly sweeps us up in a wild, rough-hewn subjectivity, taking in the great thing about spring flowers, or the nippiness of a wet night, from Nina’s vantage. These point-of-view photographs are accompanied by the sound of regular susurrations, which we acknowledge as her respiratory; it’s as if Kulumbegashvili had been urgent a stethoscope in opposition to Nina’s chest, one which perceives not solely her inhalations and exhalations but in addition the very circulate of her emotions and ideas.
Certainly, the true topic of the movie’s examination seems to be Nina herself, a health care provider whose regular, unfailingly skilled floor barely conceals self-lacerating anguish. However that anguish, in flip, is inextricable from—and should even give rise to—a deep and unshakable ethical crucial: to do the perfect that she will for the ladies beneath her care. These embody hopeful, expectant mothers-to-be; reluctant, terrified ones; and girls who’ve determined that, for now, they won’t be moms in any respect. The movie’s insistent give attention to the ethical dedication of an abortion supplier, slightly than the boxed-in desperation of an abortion seeker, differentiates it, in a refined however necessary means, from dramas like “Taking place,” “By no means Hardly ever Generally All the time,” and Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and a couple of Days” (2007). Though Mungiu’s concentrated depth seems like one in all a number of detectable influences on Kulumbegashvili’s work, it can not account for a couple of startling moments when she abandons realism fully.
“Starting” ends with the sight of a person’s physique disintegrating into mud—an Previous Testomony allusion (“to mud you shall return”), in addition to a haunting leap into abstraction. “April,” methodical although it might be, openly pursues the inexplicable all through. The primary and final photographs we see are of a unadorned, hulking determine, recognizably a girl however by no means recognized, with drooping breasts, wrinkled pores and skin, and a featureless void of a face. Early on, she shuffles mournfully by what seems to be one other dimension, a zone of utter darkness. She says nothing; she doesn’t appear to have a mouth, although that doesn’t maintain her from respiratory and wheezing as closely as Nina does. Might this stooped, deformed illusion in truth be Nina—or is she a scarred vestige of her, a manifestation of Nina’s concern, her lust, or her rage? By the tip, Kulumbegashvili, drawing now on New Testomony imagery, has supplied up nonetheless one other risk: this creature, for all her fearsome unloveliness, is likely to be a type of redemptive miracle, a girl’s worst fears mobilized into significant motion. Not suspended in darkness, she presses slowly onward, into the sunshine. ♦
