April: dread inhabits every frame of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s brilliant abortion drama
Déa Kulumbegashvili follows up her masterpiece Beginning (2020) with an unflinching story of a Georgian obstetrician whose career is threatened by her reputation as an abortionist.
It comes in with the breath and never comes out, the dread that lives in your chest from the first, uncanny scene of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s severe and brilliant April, incredibly only her second film after her debut masterpiece Beginning (2020). The dread is like a toxin polluting the damp fields and changeable skies of the Georgian countryside in spring – not that summer will bring relief. April might be the cruellest month, but in Kulumbegashvili’s Georgia, for Kulumbegashvili’s women, all the months are cruel.
The dread is in everything, in the leaves and the wind and the clear water gurgling over the stones of the riverbed, and most especially it is in that strange figure that suddenly exists in one corner of the frame, a naked, ancient thing, definitely a woman, definitely a monster, with wasting flesh hanging down in folds from a grotesquely featureless face. The figure is never explained, but listen carefully to the children’s bright voices chattering incongruously on the soundtrack, and relate them to a story you’ll hear later of two young sisters playing in the mud of the riverbank, and you begin to form an idea. And listen, in particular, to the breathing, that omnipresent sonic motif, a slow, in-out wheezing sigh that comes from the nightmare figure, but is also inside your own ears, coming from inside your own throat.
For a filmmaker so exquisitely precise in the design and choreography of her visuals (courtesy of cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan), here Kulumbegashvili relies to an eerie degree on sound to carry the import of a scene. In a hospital delivery room a live birth is in progress, and not one for the squeamish (it’s a real woman giving real birth to a real baby). But it’s only a quick mutter from the attending doctor, and the total silence of the newborn, that tells us something is wrong. Then, with a radical, destabilising cut we are in the long, cold corridor of the hospital where the OB-GYN, Nina (another fathomless performance from Beginning’s Ia Sukhitashvili) is waiting to be called in to answer to the livid, grieving father’s accusations of malpractice.
In her superior’s office, in a shot arranged so that three men – hospital boss, investigating doctor and bereaved father – are stacked up on the right hand side, dwarfing Nina on the left, Nina is under suspicion not so much due to the easily explained irregularities in the delivery, as because of her reputation as an abortionist. Out of a sense of compassion that is surprising in one so hard-edged, she performs illicit terminations for local women and girls who need to keep the procedure a secret, usually from their male partners. Abortion may be legal in Georgia, but religiosity and patriarchy combine, especially in remote areas, to make it a cause for biblical shame and occasionally equally biblical punishment.
And so in the inverse of the birth scene, there is an even more unflinching, if far less graphic sequence in which Nina performs a mercy abortion on the daughter of a downtrodden neighbour. It is just one locked-off, abstract shot but the effect is transfixing, forcing us to fixate on sensorial details like the rustling of the crude plastic sheet that has turned a kitchen table into an operating theatre, or the tiny elastic marks on the mother’s forearm where she’s rolled up her sweater sleeve to better bear down on her daughter’s squirming torso.
What motivates Nina to continue this career-threatening practice, when, as someone remarks, “No one will thank you and no one will defend you,” is one of April’s many mysteries. Another is Nina’s own attitude to intimacy and sex, exemplified by her stoic reaction when a grubby hookup turns violent and later, by her alien, untender gaze at a sleeping lover, at the stirrup of his abdomen, the crook of his thigh, the curve of his penis. Even when looking out over poppyfields and marigolds, witnessing the countryside buzzing, barking and blossoming to life, Sukhitashvili’s titanic performance of inner conflict and bone-chilling loneliness, lets us understand the true depths of Kulumbegashvili’s excoriatingly intelligent despair.
For all her rebellion and acts of resistance, the very existence of that wheezing deformity within Nina, that thing that lives inside her that got paralysed with fright and helplessness beside a muddy bank years ago and never got free, represents the final triumph of the malignant force that is patriarchal oppression. The most monstrous thing that a monster can do is make you believe that the monster is you.
► April is screening in the Official Competition at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival.