In Bloom (Nana Ekvitimishvili, 2013): Georgia

Rewieved by Alan Gueler viewed at the AFI Fest

In Bloom

It seems like all the movies coming from eastern Europe  today portray their own county as negative with sad narratives, bad life standards and sad characters. It’s like the purpose of the movie is to feel sorry about them. This movie is no exception, form beginning to end it’s a sad story, you don’t get any happy feelings by watching this movie.

Eka Khizanishvili (Lika Babluani) is a young girl living in Georgia and the film is about her life. The movie is set on real events.
I didn’t like the narrative at all,  if you’re gonna make a fiction based on true events, the story have to be amazing, otherwise you could just do a documentary about it. This story is not amazing, things are happening in the movie but nothing ever changes. Whatever happens, the situation is always the same, her life situation doesn’t change. You just sit through the movie, waiting for a twist in the story, but it never happens.

The whole movie is shot in  bright daylight to avoid trouble with lightning equipment and it’s also shot with a Steadicam only. All scenes are also shot in one take, and the camera operator follows the events as if we in the audience are ghosts.  Why I say that is because the camera follows the events close to the protagonist Eka. And because every scene is shot in one take, the camera operator have to do a lot of movement around set and the does it very skillfully without filming himself in a mirror or window.

The movie is barely edited and doesn’t use any non-diegetic sound, but the actors performances and the directing of actors is very well performed, the takes could be up to 5 minutes long and to make 20 characters to perform their act perfectly without anyone failing must have been very hard to do.

I did not like this movie, it just didn’t catch my eye. I would not recommend it to anyone, but if you disagree with me, we look at movies at two different ways.