Ekvtimishvili: Grdzeli Nateli Dgheebi (In Bloom) (2013)

At first glance, In Bloom seems like a somewhat standard coming-of-age drama, centred on two fourteen-year-old girls – Eka (Lika Babulani) and Natia (Mariam Bokeria) - growing up in Tbilisi in the early 1990s, shortly after Georgia’s restoration of independence from the former Soviet Union. Shot in a loose, languid neorealist style, we follow the girls in their day-to-day life with the same calm, impassive, almost hypnotic presence that they bring to their performances – they have the authenticity and immediacy of the most compelling non-professional actors - as they navigate their relationships with classmates, family and each other. For the first third, at least, the stage seems set for a fairly modest, small-scale vision of adolescence, in which a series of gradual realisations or revelations propel the girls little by little into the adult world. However, while those realisations do occur, there's also a dawning realisation that the adult world doesn’t really exist in this society, which, as we’re continually reminded, is severely and traumatically depleted by the outflux of soldiers and support required for the civil war that was taking place in Georgia at this time. That’s not to say that there are no adults – of course, they’re everywhere – but that there is a steadily increasing refusal on the part of the adult world to take any responsibility or protective interest in the children around them, least of all Eka and Natia, which turns out to be uncannier and more dystopian than a world in which adults simply aren’t around, or don’t exist. As a result, the girls gradually come to realise that they are both already, at some level, adults – at least in the eyes of adults around them - ripe for sex, marriage and domestic life at the age of fourteen, as Natia is abducted and press-ganged into marriage by a local family in front of a crowd of locals who remain utterly impassive, indifferent and impotent in the face of her fate. From that moment on, the film doesn’t feel like a coming-of-age drama so much as a dissection of what made Georgia, at this point in time, so inimical to a coming-of-age drama, as Nina Ekvtimishvili paints an incredible picture of her home country as a limbic state, poised at the verge of an independence it still can’t quite handle, in which every adult is continually and compulsively falling back upon their most childish selves. Perhaps that’s why the film feels so oddly, crisply empty – every source of light feels somewhat spartan and hollow, as if it’s echoing off tiles or filtered through glass – or why Eka and Natia’s entry into adult society just makes them feel more and more sequestered in a childhood world of their own. And yet the great surprise of the film is that that childhood world still turns out to be nurturing – if there’s no difference between being adults and being children, then it’s also possible for Eka and Natia to retreat back to their fourteen-year old selves in a moment’s notice, which imbues them and the film with a real, hard-earned resilience, as if learning how to remain children were the best lesson to be learned in a world without adults.