Country: Georgia
Film: Repentance /
Monanieba (1984)
The death of Varlam Aravidze, a charismatic public figure, is
the cause of solemn mourning and fond tributes in the Georgian town where he
once served as mayor. But when his exhumed corpses shows up in his family's
garden the next day, it becomes clear that someone doesn't wish him to rest in
peace. After being dug up twice more, Varlam's son Abel and grandson Tornike
lie in ambush and arrest the culprit: an unassuming cake decorator named Keti
Barateli. At her trial she admits to desecrating the grave but doesn't plead
guilty, explaining by way of an extended flashback. As a child she witnessed
Varlam's rise and his abuses of power as
a hypocritical functionary of the Communist party. He befriends Keti's parents,
Sandro, an artist, and Nino, whose beauty Varlam covets, imposing on them with
his oafish joviality and superficial
intellectualism. Varlam pressures Sandro to make socially conscious art
(by which he means pro-government art depicting heroic progress), but Sandro
eloquently insists on his independence from ideology. Soon after Sandro is
arrested and sent to a work camp on the strength of a slanderous letter signed
by rivals. Varlam defends his self-serving adherence to what he sees as his
duty; calling the will of the masses his "holy of holies." Keti never
sees her father again, but when lumber from work camp is waylaid at a local
depot, she finds his name amongst hundreds of others curved on the timber.
Meanwhile, the culture of groundless accusations and mindless persecutions
spins completely out of control and even Varlam becomes disillusioned with the
cause he spearheaded.
Back in the present day, Keti reiterates her promise that if
freed she will continue to harass Varlam's corpse. Tornike is shaken to the
core by the trial. He knew his grandfather only as a popular hero and kindly
madman whom he frequently visited in an abandoned silo where he lived out his
final days tormented, as Tornike now realizes, by guilt. He sides with Keti, and is outraged to
realize that his father, even knowing the truth, plans to have her locked in an
asylum to protect his family's reputation and position. Abel defends his
father, saying that it was a politically complicated time and that Varlam was
merely carrying out his job, but his son argues that, "Man is born a human
being first. He becomes a public servant later." Abel suffers nightmares
and questions his motivations, but can't even be sure that his pangs of
conscience are not just fear. It falls on Tornike, young enough to be repulsed
by the pragmatic 'justice' of his father and the courts, to make an extreme act
of repentance.
Only a handful of Soviet Bloc films dared to question the
witch-hunt mentality and aimless persecution of Communist Party's ideological
purges before the fall of the USSR. Examples include The Joke (from the Czech
Republic) and Interrogation (from Poland), but Repentance is especially
interesting for the ethical and moral scope of its three act structure. In the
first part, the audience is kept thoroughly in the dark about who Varlam was
and why someone doesn't want him buried, mirroring not just the confusion of
the Aravidze family, but foreshadowing the anguish of not knowing the truth
that Keti and other victims lived with for decades. The second act, told
entirely in flashback, is the longest, and is a terrifyingly real though
frequently surreal study of resistance (Sandro) and complicity (Varlam) with
Avtandil Makharadze delivering a chilling performance as the
perpetually-grinning two-faced mayor. But it is the third act that is perhaps the
most rare and compelling, as we watch the second and third generation decide
how to deal with a legacy of injustice, sin and guilt. Abel, his wife and his
son each react very differently to the revelations about their vaunted patriarch and
their conflicting desires to deny, cover-up, ignore, rationalize, underplay,
absolve or do penance for his crimes becomes the film's most profound and
intricate moral statement.
Director Tengiz Abuladze (who made Repentance as the third part
of a thematic trilogy) doesn't employ particularly fancy camerawork or staging.
His style is primarily realist, but inflected with moments of dark comedy as
when a fire hydrant geyser quite literally drowns out the whole of Varlam's
debut speech. In stark counterpoint are frequent digressions into dreams, in
which the indirect and amorphous forces of oppression manifest themselves in
scenes of warning, danger and horror. Perhaps the longest and most telling is a
scene in which Sandro stands trial before Varlam, a white grand piano and the blind
Lady Justice. There Sandro learns that the plan of the half-crazed friend who
accused him is to name thousands of people as conspirators in bizarre and
impossible schemes in the hope of unmasking the absurdity of the trial. This
plan is doomed, of course, to backfire and feed the flames of the witch-hunt.
Absurdity has long been a mainstay of Soviet Bloc cinema both as a means to
evade censorship and to grapple with history, but Abuladze seems skeptical of
its effectiveness, which perhaps explains his strange, ambivalent and yet undeniably potent mixture of
realist and surrealist modes to tell the epic story of Repentance.
My Favorites:
Repentance
Kin-Dza-Dza
Salt for Svanetia
Major Directors:
Tengiz Abuladze, Otar Ioselliani, Irakli Kvirikadze, Sergei
Parajanov
