Déa Kulumbegashvili’s April is a bone-rattling drama about what it means to be a lady within the nation of Georgia. The nation’s legal guidelines allow being pregnant termination solely as much as 12 weeks — earlier than some folks even know they’re anticipating — and even then, rural stigma prevents a lot of them from accessing care. Kulumbegashvili locations her protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) in opposition to this risky backdrop, as an obstetrician who dangers her profession by driving to far-flung villages to assist pregnant ladies in want of abortions.
Whereas the movie’s focus is the aspersions forged on Nina’s character, it tells its story in indirect methods, with beautiful confrontations of violence and bodily perform that type a visceral material. The movie presents life as an overlapping showreel of beginning, dying, being pregnant, abortion, and intercourse, all aspects of feminine expertise that Kulumbegashvili merges right into a monstrous beast — not simply narratively, however actually, by way of nightmarish imagery.
All of the whereas, April unfolds with the sort of unrelenting pressure that takes it from understated drama to razor-wire thriller, a metamorphosis owed to not dashing up its pictures, however slowing down and lingering on them for jaw-dropping lengths of time. It is a movie that induces revulsion, however on the identical time, is simply too magnetic to divert your eyes away from.
What’s April about?
The opening sounds and pictures of April are squirm-inducing, however instantly hypnotic. A humanoid determine wanders in a darkish and empty void, bare and hunched-over — both like a fetus, or an outdated girl — as breathy whispers devour the soundscape. These step by step rework to sounds of laughter and kids enjoying, as if this mysterious being have been separated from some phantom household by solely a skinny layer of actuality. Even earlier than the film presents its topic, it calls to thoughts pictures of abortion and of getting old, woven collectively in some nightmare of anxious remorse.
With out warning, stray pictures of rain and cautious noticed pure landscapes yank us right into a hospital room, as Kulumbegashvili captures a lady giving beginning below harsh fluorescents — however this lovely, bloody, painful miracle of life ends in dying. The mom and her husband launch an inquiry in opposition to Nina as to why their child died, inserting the OBGYN below a highlight of her personal, and leaving looming doubts for the viewers as as to whether she was at fault.
Nina, middle-aged and single, makes for a straightforward goal by males seeking to query her character — particularly as she’s lengthy been the topic of rumors about unlawful abortions. Her superiors on the hospital appear prepared to look the opposite method, however solely up to a degree. Given the investigation, who higher to throw below the bus than the getting old spinster who already has a black mark in opposition to her?
Nonetheless, none of this stops Nina from persevering with to to journey to rural villages on her personal time to carry out what she sees as her responsibility towards uneducated ladies whose lives can be ruined by single being pregnant — because of threats from native males — even when they needed to be moms within the first place. She represents a selection, or at the least an possibility, when these ladies have none, even when it places her personal selections in danger.
Mashable High Tales
April is dreamlike, however hauntingly life like.
Simply as usually as Kulumbegashvili’s cuts to the aforementioned, formless creature, it presents prolonged scenes of Nina touring to the countryside that provide house for viewers to ruminate — and to get well. The stress the film in any other case holds may be debilitating.
Take, for example, a prolonged abortion scene. When Nina helps a younger mute woman, Nana (Roza Kancheishvili), terminate her being pregnant, Kulumbegashvili’s digicam — courtesy of cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan — focuses not on anyone character, however the assembly of palms and our bodies. The process itself is obscured, however the body’s focus is Nana’s torso as she lies on a plastic tablecloth. On one aspect of the body, Nina works diligently to guard the younger woman’s future. On the opposite aspect, the woman’s mom, Mzia (Ana Nikolava), holds and comforts her. It is a traumatic sequence as a result of feelings it expresses and conjures by juxtaposing a mom’s act of affection with a daughter’s yelps of ache, by way of a process that would have its personal severe penalties, ought to it’s found.
The ladies in April are all caught between a rock and a tough place, and Nina’s story embodies theirs in microcosm. She turns into, within the course of, a sort of cypher of womanhood, and at instances she even imagines herself because the formless creature (particularly when she sleeps with one in all her superiors), as if her self-perception and fears of getting old have been tied to being pregnant and intercourse. Her private relationship to being pregnant, nonetheless, isn’t clarified — whether or not she’s ever been pregnant, or had an abortion herself — as a result of she appears to wall that a part of herself off from different folks. Maybe it is necessary for the job.
In April, there is a violence and wonder inherent to each being pregnant and abortion, simply as there may be to nature. Kulumbegashvili appears to steadily draw this comparability by way of transitions that contain thundering rain and plush, flowery landscapes. Nonetheless, violence of a distinct sort lurks in each nook, too, and seems immediately, with out warning.
April makes the violence of males really feel gut-churning.
In an early scene, when the daddy who accused Nina confronts her, the scene is eerily quiet, till he has an outburst and spits in Nina’s face. The sound this makes, and the impression it has within the course of, is as visceral (if no more so) than any picture of beginning or abortion that Kulumbegashvili presents. Though male medical doctors and directors declare to be on Nina’s aspect, the body locations them at odds together with her even in its slim, square-ish side ratio, seating them at an workplace desk alongside the aforementioned father, as if she have been a felony on trial.
The violence of males, by way of their actions, and thru the constraints they create, is virtually the glue that binds April collectively — even when the film veers towards empowering carnal pleasures. Nina, maybe to deal with the pressures ( or perhaps she simply feels prefer it) cruises by way of the night time and picks up males to hook up with. Nonetheless, there is a skinny line between pleasure and ache, and never in a horny method. Males attempt to benefit from her, and develop into violent with a quickness, turning quiet moments oppressively loud, like gunshots echoing by way of the night time.
There is a equally razor-thin margin between intercourse and dying, if solely due to the results imposed on intercourse — or somewhat, on ladies for having intercourse — that manifests in a number of methods. Intercourse itself results in violence. Or it results in being pregnant, which forces some ladies to place their lives in danger, whether or not they have abortions or not. A lot of that is implied or referenced somewhat than proven outright. However the specter of those prospects is ever-present, bolstered by way of Kulumbegashvili’s frames, which seize the highly effective gazes of males by way of unbroken stares on the digicam and the minimized place of ladies by way of their minuscule measurement in body.
April is a ghostly movie that beats with life at its most fragile, contrasted with pictures of pure landscapes in ways in which recommend (and power) a deeper reflection on the physique and spirit. It is deeply discomforting in ways in which cinema should be when making such a posh level concerning the methods ladies’s experiences — or experiences outlined by gendered violence, from the womb to the tomb — are so intrinsically sure by private fears and wishes, and by the fragility of private autonomy in a world that so simply legislates it away by way of disgrace. It is a masterful work.
April is presently looking for distribution.
UPDATE: Sep. 25, 2024, 4:18 p.m. EDT April was reviewed out of its World Premiere on the Venice Worldwide Movie Pageant on Sept. 7, 2024. This submit has been up to date to toast its New York Movie Pageant premiere.