Don’t let the identify idiot you: “April” is a wintery affair. By far essentially the most uncompromising imaginative and prescient to play at this 12 months’s Venice Movie Competition, director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s gradual cinema horror present may additionally be essentially the most audacious. That audacity interprets much less by the use of size or provocation – Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Concord Korine’s “Baby Invasion” have these laurel locked up – than by the use of self-assurance, from the filmmaker’s steadfast perception in her personal artistic gambit to her viewers’s willingness to immerse themselves inside.
That is, in so many phrases, a swing for auteur enshrinement so crystalline in intent that it namedrops Mikhail Kalatozov’s “The Cranes Are Flying” and visually cites Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” from the very bounce.
Kulumbegashvili can fairly wager on her movie’s long-term prospects as soon as it meets the precise crowd (“April” boasts the manufacturing assist of Luca Guadagnino, who showered Kulumbegashvili’s prior effort, “Beginning,” with nearly each eligible prize when he headed the San Sebastian jury in 2020), however the diverging competition response between Kalatozov’s 1957 Palme d’Or winner and Glazer’s 2013 topic to boos and jeers displays the shakier outlook for such formal extremes upon rapid arrival.
In fact, the movie is all too acquainted with these specific dangers, capping a gap prologue that finds a humanoid monster slinking into a pitch black abyss with a depiction of reside childbirth for an toddler that (narratively, no less than) doesn’t final minutes on this world. Shot from above and leaving nothing to the creativeness, the prolonged sequence has a jolting impact, at first surprising with a scientific view of the only act that unites us all (don’t fear these born of Cesarean, Kulumbegashvili later circles again to cowl that as nicely) earlier than lingering lengthy sufficient for us to surprise why an act so frequent ought to stay so obscure.
Seen in a sure method, “April” could be described as a character examine centering on Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), the OB-GYN-turned-scapegoat upon that tragic flip. Solely we don’t really see Nina’s face totally lit in close-up till the one-hour level, nor can we hear her identify spoken aloud earlier than the penultimate scene. As a substitute, Kulumbegashvili overlays views, collapsing her digicam, her lead, and her viewers atop each other. If not totally assuming the first-person, the movie usually frames interactions in close to POVs that hew the character’s basic eye-line and place in house at a given time.
Even when it breaks or performs with that framing and blocking gadget, “April” subsumes the primary character’s Hippocratic view into all aesthetic selections. As a physician, Nina is, reasonably by definition, a scientific pragmatist; she treats the signs and tries to resolve the issues in entrance of her. That a kind of points is the entire lack of (authorized) household planning on this religious and rural patriarchy doesn’t actually faze our doctor. Someone’s going to do it, she figures; may as nicely be the one with medical coaching. As with that early birthing sequence, the movie interprets this identical scientific reasoning in visible phrases, confronting parts usually left off-screen and casting them in chilly mild.
Again and again, Nina confounds the patriarchal order by refusing it recognition, however she pays the value for her insolence, from a transactional sexual encounter turned violent as soon as she asks for reciprocation, to the profession put at risk as soon as rumors of her extracurricular medical providers start to swirl. That profession is all she has, as the value for residing past the reigning order is a lifetime of solitude and abnegation. The director’s almost-but-not-quite POV compositions intensify that solitude, framing characters in dialog or sexual congress as fully remoted types.
Shirking exposition till completely essential, “April” follows Nina over a nominally condensed interval of simply a few days, all destabilized by lengthy takes that curdle and warp the felt passage of time. We see her with a hospital superior whose overly acquainted questions may trace at office harassment till we study of their shared previous and undimmed flames. We see journey throughout huge plains whose nice expanse belies a cloistered world the place everyone seems to be up one another’s enterprise, and we see her at work, each on the clock and off. Because it builds a reasonably deliberate tempo, the movie implicates and consists of us in Nina’s sense of trudging accountability till we lastly see her face in full as her eyes beam on the sight of a wholesome new child, and higher perceive the eagerness that guides her.
Lest we slip too near realism, Kulumbegashvili usually returns to that opening homunculus – a stooped determine with a backbone protruding from mounds of melted flesh that is perhaps a model of Nina lastly faraway from all of the human impulses nonetheless anchoring her, or perhaps one thing fully completely different (a wink to that goop deformed thug from “Robocop?” Who is aware of — that is an open textual content). To that finish, the odd sight provides a closing, unresolvable query to a movie that frequently makes formal leaps assuming that the viewers drawn in will work alongside to catch up. That takes a sure mad audacity, and a degree of perception each in self and within the viewers that flatters – and bewilders.
