IN BLOOM (M) ★★★★
Selected release
102 minutes
This is a story of adolescence and female friendship under pressure, explored with a quietly engrossing combination of familiarity and strangeness.
In Bloom, written by Nana Ekvtimishvili and co-directed by Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross, is set in Georgia in the early 1990s, during a time of political turbulence and hardship. It is a world of breadlines, boredom and casual violence, a time in which a boy can give a girl a gun as a token of love and concern. This gun, passed from hand to hand, becomes a striking symbolic presence, full of latent possibilities and menace.
The recipient of this unlikely gift is 14-year-old Natia (Mariam Bokeria). She and her best friend, Eka (Lika Babluani), are at the centre of the film, making the best of circumstances in which choices are limited, particularly for young women. Natia seems the more poised and worldly of the two, but appearances can be deceptive.
The filmmakers, with cinematographer Oleg Mutu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) keep the camera close, fluid; in long shots, we follow the characters almost as if they were figures in an observational documentary. Yet it's not a work that tells us everything, however; there are intriguing gaps and interstices in the film, small mysteries and uncertainties about people, incidents, past events.
Ekvtimishvili and Gross allow events to unfold gradually, but they also capture sudden shifts of mood, escalations of intensity. Boredom spills over into rebellion in the classroom; a husband and wife start to quarrel with a weary sense of inevitability.
The filmakers are prepared to take their time in certain scenes: the most striking example of this takes place at a wedding, in which a character begins to dance – it's a quietly enthralling sequence, an expression of private emotion within a public context.
As Natia becomes locked into a new existence, the increasingly determined Eka starts to find a way to come to terms with – even resist – the culture around her: she must deal with absence and aggression, the bewildering behaviour of adults and authority figures, the disturbing unpredictability of daily life.
