Beginning (2020)

Directed by: Dea Kulumbegashvili | 125 minutes | drama | Actors: Ia Sukhitashvili, Rati Oneli, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Saba Gogichaishvili, Ia Kokiashvili, Mari Kopchenovi, Giorgi Tsereteli

‘Beginning’ delves into the lives of the couple David and Jana and their son Giorgi. They are Jehovah’s Witnesses somewhere remote in the Georgian countryside. There, foreman David has a small parish to practice his faith with others. Fate strikes. During a service, local extremists throw Molotov cocktails inside David’s church. The prayer building burns down completely. David sees it as his calling to look for financial support and a new place to realize another house of prayer. Then ‘Beginning’ focuses on his wife Jana, who sinks into a quagmire of doubts about her life path after this violent incident. Then a mysterious and dark figure suddenly appears in her life.

‘Beginning’, directed by the debutant Déa Kulumbegashvili, follows the lines of transcendental cinema as one of the producers of this film, the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, likes to see it. The latter is renowned for his dogmatic film style, but at the same time experimental attitude as a filmmaker. In his film ‘Stellet Licht’ (2007), for example, he shows sunrise and sunset in real time. Transcendental cinema is looking for the unnameable, in the small and large gesture. They are films that try to capture spirituality in religion or nature. Kulumbegashvili is looking for moments like this in her film, some times it works wonderfully, but other times a lot less. Then the film lingers in platitudes about religious people, such as that Jehovah’s leave little room for individual freedom, that they are obsessed with life after death and what you have to do and not do for it.

In addition, Reygadas strives for as much realism as possible. Just like the Italian neo-realists of shortly after the Second World War, Reygadas casts ‘ordinary’ people as actors. Kulumbegashvili also seeks refuge in amateur talent, which works out particularly well with the child ‘actors’. The shorter scenes with the youthful Jehovah’s show how fragile and at the same time influential a religious upbringing is. Jana is strict about her own son and the other children in Sunday School, but she also can’t help laughing when the kids get caught up in biblical scriptures. From the mouths of children, all those religious abstractions about God and the good life sometimes sound unintentionally funny.

Moreover, Reygadas shuns many cinematic effects, such as excessive use of camera movements or computer effects, in order not to do violence to reality and to let what happens in front of the camera speak – the wonder of everyday life. Almost as if in leather, Kulumbegashvili mainly chose static shots in which the viewer can gaze into the distance for minutes until something happens. You also often see in a close-up only part of a person’s body with the face shrouded in mist. In addition, the film successfully uses the classic 4:3 image format. As a result, the characters seem literally locked up in their rigid environment. On a number of occasions, Kulumbegashvili’s cinematic choices have an almost hypnotic effect and give ‘Beginning’ an eerie atmosphere, as if it were constantly haunted in rural Georgia and in Jana’s head. Nevertheless, just as often the same choices get bogged down in an indefinable vagueness. ‘Beginning’ is ultimately a courageous attempt to imagine the elusiveness of Jana’s situation for us. However, this highly stylized approach sometimes offers too little guidance to fully empathize with Jana’s spiritual storm and fate.