by Jason Adams
If you throw a ball, or even better a stick of dynamite, straight up into the air there is a moment of pause, of tranquility, at its peak, before it comes tumbling down. The apogee, as its known, is a fascinating word to me, close as it is to apology -- in my mind I always picture the shrug of the cartoon Coyote as he begins his plummet. Apogee, but whoops here I come. Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning, as stunning a debut film as any I've seen, lingers in the feeling of that pause -- the world feels suspended, we're light of breath and danger is nigh, but man the view is something.
The film begins and we meet Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili, staggeringly good) and her husband David (Rati Oneli) as they greet parishioners inside their sparse, fresh-smelling new Jehovah's Witness church, and immediately we notice two things. First that the film was filmed in the squarish frame ratio that's become shorthand for art-minded movie-makers looking to quick express claustrophobia -- think First Reformed or The Lighthouse; right away we know that these are people who are stifled by their surroundings...
The second thing we notice only reinforces the first, and that's the static, distant nature of the camera. We are situated so far at the back of Yana and David's church that what we're looking at could be a set built on a theater stage, and we are audience members, a far-off fourth wall looking in to a diorama, an ant farm. There's an automatic remove, without the move -- Kulumbegashvili's camera sits and watches, and watches, and watches. The people file in. Yana makes a few rowdy boys stand in the corner. David closes the doors and begins his sermon. And we watch, and watch, and watch.
Alfred Hitchcock once told a famous story about how to build tension -- about how just suddenly blowing up a bomb will generate shock, sure, but if you let the audience know there is a bomb minutes beforehand and have the characters move around the bomb unsuspectingly, then the audience becomes active in their participation with what's happening. We grow tense, expecting the explosion, but unsure about when. Kulumbegashvili's film manages to be both a celebration of and a counter-argument against that concept -- we become the dynamite, poised in the air, its apogee, frozen still with anxiousness towards our coming fall.
An apt place to be given that's where Yana exists, we come to discover -- we find out she signed up for this marriage to this religious man not fully anticipating how much the role of "wife" and "mother" she was going to be expected to now define herself as; Beginning is the story of Yana's realization that she's at a turning point, either accept her fate or fall, fall, and fall hard and fast. At one point she says, “It’s as if I’m waiting for something to start, or to end," and then in slips the devil, so to speak, to whisper her down.
The bulk of the film finds Yana at home alone with her son as her husband heads off for church business, and she discovers the yawning maw of the future staring up from beneath her feet. Terrible omens begin sneaking into Yana's frames -- we watch her curl up in a shadow-dappled field to see her sleep to dream, possibly it's a dream, of her child in two impossible places at once, making of domesticity a spectral trance which she moves through semi-anesthetized. The remove is somewhat clinicized but there is an emotionality at work, in the place of a rigorous intellectualism -- it's less like we're watching Michael Haneke's version of Jeanne Dielman than it is we're watching Chantal Akerman's version of Cache. The signifiers that slip in are less thought, more feeling.
The images are gorgeous, painterly, visions of a purple-flowered Eden and of a stony desert spring that somehow keep bringing Job's difficulties to mind -- the landscape is Biblical the minute Yana steps outdoors. Alternately when she's inside the feeling of a puppet-house overwhelms -- doors seem a mile high and hallways ten feet too wide; you half expect to see a hand the size of heaven reach in to reposition Yana as she sits, considering her fate. The things that happen to her have an ambiguous quality -- they could be parables of her days that she is teaching herself to find her way across time. A magical realism suffuses the light, even in the starkest circumstances -- if someone were to simply lay down and disintegrate we wouldn't be surprised. That is, after all, just what happens.