SINCE OTAR LEFT
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: B+
Zeitgeist Films
Directed by: Julie Bertuccelli
Written by: Julie Bertuccelli, Roger Bohbot
Cast: Esther Gorintin, Nino Khomassouridze, Dinara
Droukarova
Screened at: Loews 19th St, NYC, 4/14/04
If Al Franken directed this film instead of Julie Bertuccelli, he
could have called it "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)."
There are two kinds of lies that befall the principals in "Since
Otar Left," which is filmed in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia
(formerly the Georgian SSR when it was part of the Soviet
Union). The overriding falsehood is what we call a white lie, one
which is meant without hostility to avoid hurting the feelings of
the recipient such as not telling a person who is dying that his
situation is hopeless or telling your girlfriend "We have to break
up...it's not you...it's me." That's a perfectly acceptable one,
some say. The other fib is a big one, a nasty one, such as
saying that the reason the U.S. had to go to war with Iraq is that
Saddam was building and hiding weapons of mass destruction.
In this film about lying, the characters speak Georgian,
French, and a little Russian, all nicely subtitled in English for an
American audience. With Checkhovian resonance, Julie
Bertuccelli and Roger Bohbot's script presents three
generations of a Tbilisi family who live in a dilapidated house
the cost of which probably does not exceed the value of an
extensive collection of mostly French books, collectors' items of
the house matriarch, ninety-year-old Eka (Esther Gorintin) and
one of her two prized treasures in life. Eka's other valued
bounty is her son, Otar, a physician who apparently was so
unable to make the kind of living he considered adequate in his
home country that he went instead to Paris where he worked in
construction.
Eka regularly gets postal mail from her son, who occasionally
sends small sums of money, and she values her granddaughter
Ada (Dinara Drukarova), who reads the mail to her in French
while giving Eka a foot massage. In the middle is Marina (Nino
Khomasuridze), whose husband died in Soviet-occupied
Afghanistan years back. When Marina and Ada are told that
Otar has died in a tragic building accident, they seek to hide the
news from Otar's mother, Eka.
The story is a simple one, the sort that presumably many in
the theater audience can connect, given the likelihood that they,
perhaps as children, were protected from similar, unfortunate
occurrences such as the death of a pet ("the bird flew away" or
"the dog simply ran off"). This is a sincerely-felt film by debut
feature director Julie Bertucelli, one which is dominated by the
design of daughter and grand-daughter to protect the 90-year-
old from a shock that could conceivably lead to a fatal heart
attack or stroke. During the course of the story, we see some of
the underlying tensions, such as Eka's belief that her daughter
had not loved young Ada enough and that the lack of strong ties
could be responsible for Ada's lack of interest in her studies and
her desire to leave what she considers a repressive national
environment.
The other falsehood lies in the political arena. Georgians,
according to Bertucelli, have been lied to by the government for
at least seventy years, so much so that Eka, though apparently
well read with books on her shelf by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and others, considers Stalin her hero. "Stalin never gave an
order to kill anyone," she states with a straight face. For her
part, Marina is not too fond of her homeland where water goes
off in the middle of showers and lights flicker on and off at will.
Esther Gorintin's acting is the marvel here. The 90-year-old
performer, spry enough to join in a mid-film break into song and
dance, began her acting career at the age of 85, a Polish-born
actress who moved to Paris in the 1930s and miraculously
escaped the Holocaust.
"Since Otar Left" could have fallen into soap-opera mode but
remains always true to its Chekhovian ambiance.
Not Rated. 103 minutes.(c) 2004 by Harvey Karten at
Harveycritic@cs.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 37668 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1276136 X-RT-TitleID: 1131895 X-RT-SourceID: 570 X-RT-AuthorID: 1123 X-RT-RatingText: B+
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