This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways.
This debut feature from the young Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili is exceptional in many ways. It stands out not only for its hypnotic quality as a film that feels like that of an already formed auteur, as well as for the complex psychological portrait of its central female character, but also, rather more paradoxically, for the environment from which it has emerged. Always distinctive, the cinema of the small Caucasian nation of Georgia has usually been distinguished by its vivid local colour, but there’s nothing like that here: though it’s set in the director’s homeland – indeed in the very landscape in which she herself grew up – it’s as if Kulumbegashvili has stripped back atmosphere and story alike to wind up a tight drama that could be taking place anywhere in the world where oppression, both private and public, can be found. Two decades
Beginning Movie Review
Director: Dea Kulumbegashvili
Cast: Ia Sukhitashvili, Rati Oneli, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Saba Gogichaishvili
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 2/4/21
Opens: January 29, 2021
One of the long gags about the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the U.S. is that when you hear your doorbell ring on Sunday morning, you pretend you’re not home. This is because the religious sect, intent on awakening religious awareness and hopefully finding new members for the church are so assertive, so confident in their morality that they can barely believe that others might not find them so. If you invite them in for tea, and by “them” we mean that there is always a pair of missionaries, you might find them to be utterly pleasant people who could win you over despite yourself. But how much do we know about their culture?
Beginning Review: A Woman Seeks Peace Amid Persecution in This Astonishing Debut Beginning Review: A Woman Seeks Peace Amid Persecution in This Astonishing Debut
Streaming on Mubi, Georgia s Oscar submission uses slow-cinema tropes to inspired, devastating ends, marking its first-time writer-director as a major talent.
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Running time: Running time: 125 MIN.
At the midpoint of her astounding first feature “Beginning,” Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili pulls off a brazen formalist coup that will either envelop you entirely in its world or freeze you out for good. On a glimmering autumn afternoon, put-together mother Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) goes strolling with her pre-teen son Giorgi (Saba Gogichaishvili) in local woodlands, pausing at a leaf-carpeted clearing, where ringing birdsong and insect chatter fuse into a kind of white noise. Carefully, she lies down and closes her eyes. For six minutes, across one unbroken, tightly framed
Yana, played by Ia Sukhitashvili, is the spirit of “Beginning.” (Photo courtesy of MUBI.)
Content warning: The film and this review depict instances, sometimes very graphic, of verbal and sexual assault, including gender-based violence.
This review contains spoilers.
The circuitous nature of life in “Beginning” arrests its viewer and its protagonist in a boxed film format, rendering both to the limits it allows. What follows is a wrenching devolution of faith, trust and a woman’s very being; the beginning to an end.
Director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s feature debut centers on a rural Georgian town just outside of Tbilisi, where Jehovah’s Witnesses come together in a small white church within the confines of a majority Orthodox Christian population and neighborhood.
In the beginning of “Beginning” is the Word: a well-known Bible story, retold and unpacked during an afternoon meeting of Jehovah’s Witnesses. “What is the moral of this story?” asks the minister, David (Rati Oneli), before later adding, “How should a true Christi