Film of the Week #9: April

In Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, an obstetrician has a secret practice that threatens to jeopardize her livelihood.

In college I once wrote a paper about Eric Rohmer’s use of the indirect subjective shot in My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee. The indirect subjective shot is a point of view shot in which the frame comes close to replicating the character’s viewpoint but does not mirror it exactly. Directors can use a variety of means to demonstrate that the point of view does not entirely match that of the character’s. One such strategy is to establish that the camera might be assuming the perspective of a character and then have that character enter the frame. In Rohmer’s films the use of this shot conjures a sense of fantasy – in Claire’s Knee, Jean-Claude Brialy will sometimes enter the frame of a shot that seemed to be from his perspective, suggesting that he’s entering a fiction that is partly of his own design.

The indirect subjective shot is used to a different effect in the film April, directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili. At various points throughout the film, Kulumbegashvili will use shots that seem to mirror the perspective of the main character of the film, an OB-GYN named Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili). One thing that clues us into the possibility that the shot could be assuming her perspective is that the sound of her breathing is often audible. Similar to Rohmer, Kulumbegashavili will play with our expectations about the subjectivity of the shot by having Nina step into the frame. The duration of the indirect subjective shot and the subtlety with which Nina will slink into the frame suggests a kind of hesitancy or lingering on the precipice that characterizes her involvement with the people she encounters. Unlike in Rohmer, it is not so much a fantasy that Nina is reluctant to enter, but rather the consequences of the reality she is not fully intervening in.

Early in the film, we find Nina at a meeting in which she is taken to task for the death of a newborn that she delivered. Kulumbegashvili employs unconventional blocking in which Nina’s boss is facing the camera at the far end of the frame, while Nina’s colleague and the patient’s husband are all in profile, looking at each other from the opposite sides of a narrow table that is perpendicular to the boss’s desk. It’s a strange set-up and one that feels necessitated by the task of fitting all the characters into one master shot in the narrow academy aspect ratio. This could just be how certain offices are laid out in Georgia, but based on the rest of the film, it would appear that Kulumbegashivili gravitates toward shots in which characters are closer or farther than they might want to be from each other. A palpable unease pervades the film, both through this style of blocking the actors and in the emotionally detached interactions between the characters.

Given the opening scenes of the film, one might expect that the narrative of the film would center around the investigation into Nina’s delivery of the newborn who died shortly after delivery. However, Kulumbegashvili skirts this narrative and only returns to it near the end of the film. The primary focus of the film ends up centering around Nina’s not-so-well-kept secret activity of performing abortions and providing contraceptive pills to women who might otherwise not have access to those services. Through implication, we are led to understand that there is a cultural opposition to abortion and contraception among those in the rural area of Georgia in which the film is set. To the film’s credit, Kulumbegashivili does not present Nina as some kind of savior of women under pressure from a culture that pressures young women to give birth. Her reasons for administering this care are somewhat mundane (she says something to the effect that if she didn’t perform these services someone else would) and possibly related to her own psychosexual complexes. Throughout the film, Nina pursues sexual encounters with male strangers in the villages near the hospital she works in. Kulumbegashvili alternates between scenes of Nina providing contraceptive care and scenes of her nighttime sexual pursuits, leading to the implication that there might be a connection between her practice as an OB-GYN and her own sexual hangups.

I take it as a positive aspect of Kulumbegashvili’s artistic mission that she chooses to make Nina’s medical endeavors inextricable from her own tangle of neuroses. However, the film falls short when it comes to fashioning these character observations into a narrative that involves some kind of progression or differentiated perspective on the character. Throughout the film, Kulumbegashvili uses psychological shorthand and symbolism in place of character-based drama. This isn’t necessarily an issue in itself as many filmmakers of this ilk can get by with narrative minimalism and still craft an emotionally complex experience. But to my mind, the film throws in some figurative imagery and half-formed psychological insights and just lets these artistic assertions sit there. Rather than developing the narrative, Kulumbegashvili provides one-off scenes of Nina pursuing a sexual encounter with a man working at a gas station, Ia offering abortion pills to a pregnant teenager, and Nina wandering through a field of flowers. These scenes have engaging aspects, but they feel somewhat perfunctory in the wider context of the film, relegated to some simple expository or poetic function.

Toward the end of the film, Nina drives through the countryside during a storm and her car gets stuck in mud near the house of a deaf-mute woman for whom she performed an abortion. Earlier in the film, Nina asked her mother who it was who got the deaf-mute woman pregnant. Her mother said it could be many men in their village, introducing the possibility that it may not have been consensual. After walking into the household in the rain, Nina encounters the woman’s father, who acts cordially toward her. Nina maintains a quiet and detached manner during this scene, likely due to her not wanting to give any indication of her visits to the house to the father. The sequence ends with the father helping Nina push her car out of the mud, which rhymes with an earlier scene in which Nina recounts a childhood memory of her not helping her sister when she was drowning in mud. By film’s end, the potential meaning behind the poetic rhyming of this scene – that Nina may be freezing up when presented with a woman in danger in the same way she froze up as a child – registers tragically. While the closing of this arc packs a punch, I can’t help but feel there is something too neat and obvious about the scenario’s resolution. The film tidily connects the narrative dots, leaving the knotty elements of the drama to be swept aside.

Kulumbegashvili creates a dramatically-loaded scenario that she doesn’t seem particularly interested in playing for drama. Instead what registers are the moments in which symbolism and the conceptual underpinnings of the plot are foregrounded. The foremost example of this tendency involves a strange monster figure resembling a withered old lady that the film periodically returns to. One can draw different conclusions about what the monster represents, but one can take it to be a manifestation of Nina’s fear. While the monster's presence casts a compelling shadow over the film’s narrative, I do not think our understanding of it really changes over the course of the film. And this is part of the film’s issue – whatever stabs at conceptual meaning the film makes just kind of lie on the screen enveloped in a dramatic stasis, waiting to be interpreted. Many of the film’s formal elements are striking when considered in isolation, but at a certain point they start to feel like a grab bag of poetic signifiers. The problem with this kind of conceptual cinema is that it can be either too reductively simplistic or overly opaque. If the film were to successfully develop the symbolic elements of the film, it might create a tension between the conceptual premises and the reality of the film world. But what April leaves us with is a haphazardly sketched-out drama interspersed with symbolic moments that either connect too tidily with what we see in the film world or exist in a completely different, more mystical film world.