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 individuals 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 unstable backdrop, as an obstetrician who dangers her profession by driving to far-flung villages to assist pregnant girls in want of abortions.
Whereas the movie’s focus is the aspersions solid on Nina’s character, it tells its story in indirect methods, with gorgeous confrontations of violence and bodily operate that kind a visceral material. The movie presents life as an overlapping showreel of delivery, loss of life, being pregnant, abortion, and intercourse, all sides 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 type of unrelenting stress that takes it from understated drama to razor-wire thriller, a metamorphosis owed to not dashing up its photographs, however slowing down and lingering on them for jaw-dropping lengths of time. It is a movie that induces revulsion, however on the similar 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 previous lady — as breathy whispers devour the soundscape. These steadily rework to sounds of laughter and youngsters enjoying, as if this mysterious being had 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 photographs of abortion and of getting old, woven collectively in some nightmare of anxious remorse.
With out warning, stray photographs of rain and cautious noticed pure landscapes yank us right into a hospital room, as Kulumbegashvili captures a lady giving delivery below harsh fluorescents — however this stunning, bloody, painful miracle of life ends in loss of life. 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 if she was at fault.
Nina, middle-aged and single, makes for a simple goal by males trying to query her character — particularly as she’s lengthy been the topic of rumors about unlawful abortions. Her superiors on the hospital appear keen to look the opposite means, 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 obligation towards uneducated girls whose lives can be ruined by single being pregnant — due to threats from native males — even when they wished to be moms within the first place. She represents a alternative, or no less than an possibility, when these girls have none, even when it places her personal selections in danger.
Mashable High Tales
April is dreamlike, however hauntingly life like.
Simply as typically 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 recuperate. 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 lady, Nana (Roza Kancheishvili), terminate her being pregnant, Kulumbegashvili’s digital camera — courtesy of cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan — focuses not on anyone character, however the assembly of arms 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 lady’s future. On the opposite aspect, the lady’s mom, Mzia (Ana Nikolava), holds and comforts her. It is a traumatic sequence because of the 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 might have its personal severe penalties, ought to or not 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 type of cypher of womanhood, and at instances she even imagines herself because the formless creature (particularly when she sleeps with one in every of her superiors), as if her self-perception and fears of getting old had been tied to being pregnant and intercourse. Her private relationship to being pregnant, nonetheless, is rarely 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 individuals. Maybe it’s a necessity for the job.
In April, there is a violence and sweetness 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 unique form lurks in each nook, too, and seems all of a sudden, 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 affect it has within the course of, is as visceral (if no more so) than any picture of delivery 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 slender, square-ish facet ratio, seating them at an workplace desk alongside the aforementioned father, as if she had been a prison 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 evening and picks up males to hook up with. Nonetheless, there is a skinny line between pleasure and ache, and never in a horny means. Males attempt to reap the benefits of her, and grow to be violent with a quickness, turning quiet moments oppressively loud, like gunshots echoing by way of the evening.
There is a equally razor-thin margin between intercourse and loss of life, if solely due to the implications imposed on intercourse — or slightly, on girls for having intercourse — that manifests in a number of methods. Intercourse itself results in violence. Or it results in being pregnant, which forces some girls to place their lives in danger, whether or not they have abortions or not. A lot of that is implied or referenced slightly than proven outright. However the specter of those potentialities 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 digital camera and the minimized place of ladies by way of their minuscule dimension in body.
April is a ghostly movie that beats with life at its most fragile, contrasted with photographs of pure landscapes in ways in which recommend (and pressure) a deeper reflection on the physique and spirit. It is deeply discomforting in ways in which cinema must be when making such a posh level concerning the methods girls’s experiences — or experiences outlined by gendered violence, from the womb to the tomb — are so intrinsically sure by private fears and needs, and by the fragility of non-public autonomy in a world that so simply legislates it away by way of disgrace. It is a masterful work.
April is at the moment searching for distribution.
UPDATE: Sep. 25, 2024, 4:18 p.m. EDT April was reviewed out of its World Premiere on the Venice Worldwide Movie Competition on Sept. 7, 2024. This submit has been up to date to toast its New York Movie Competition premiere.
