Tan­ger­ines

Geor­gian writer/​director Zaza Urushadze gen­er­ates laughs from absurd sit­u­a­tion­al humour. Except the sit­u­a­tion he has con­trived is only absurd because we have grown to accept that war­ring nations dehu­man­ise each oth­er. The sight of two griz­zled ene­my sol­diers sip­ping soup at the same table, ren­dered inca­pable of hurt­ing each oth­er by respect for the house rules of their host, is real­ly a sen­si­ble riposte to the moral chaos of war.

Hold­ing the premise of the film on his shoul­ders is sea­soned Eston­ian actor, Lem­bit Ulf­sak. It is 1990 and war has bro­ken out between the Chechens, who want inde­pen­dence, and the Geor­gians. Ulf­sak plays Ivo, a Michael Haneke look-a-like whose fam­i­ly have fled the region. He has stayed behind in Geor­gia to har­vest a final, and quite clear­ly splen­did tan­ger­ine crop with his down­beat pal Mar­gus (Elmo Nüganen).

The film begins with the sight of him saw­ing a crate into exis­tence. Two gun-tot­ing Mus­lim Chechen sol­diers come a’knocking. They want food. This rangy and po-faced old man goes about pro­vid­ing them with sus­te­nance while the sol­diers exert their swag­ger caus­ing you to won­der what type of war film this is going to be. Will these sol­diers rob this oblig­ing, grand­fa­ther­ly fig­ure of his dig­ni­ty show­ing cin­e­ma-goers – for the zil­lionth time – that noth­ing is sacred in wartime?

But then Ivo snaps at the sol­diers for ogling a pic­ture of his grand­daugh­ter. They respect his courage and sud­den­ly a dif­fer­ent fam­i­ly dynam­ic is in the mix – one that grows in mag­ni­tude as the juice of the film is squeezed out. There is a shoot-out between Chechens and Geor­gians. Ivo ends up tak­ing the last men alive from both camps into his house to con­va­lesce. Ivo’s pater­nal strict­ness and ide­al­ism keeps their mutu­al­ly mur­der­ous instincts in check. He has saved them both and so they must learn to get along, at least while under his roof. Cue a slew of domes­tic scenes that are as tense as they are charm­ing as they are entertaining.

The suc­cess of this film depends upon per­for­mances that are absolute­ly sin­cere. No one is arch or glib or milk­ing com­ic poten­tial. The Chechen, Ahmed (Gior­gi Nakahshidze) clear­ly wants to gun down or stab the more seri­ous­ly wound­ed Geor­gian, Niko (Mikheil Meskhi). Niko looks at and talks to Ahmed with poi­so­nous con­tempt. Both actors resem­ble weath­ered men with faces and atti­tudes pushed into hard shapes by con­flict. Then there is Ulf­sak as Ivo. Whether heat­ing tea on the stove, sprin­kling herbs on soup or insist­ing on moral treat­ment in short ref­er­ee barks, he is mag­net­ic with a nat­u­ral­ism that seems to sug­gest that the cam­era is just anoth­er guest that has stum­bled into his home and there­fore qual­i­fied for unwa­ver­ing hospitality.

Urushadze reels the high, imper­son­al stakes of war into con­cen­trat­ed domes­tic scenes that take place under this one roof. As events play out there is both the inti­mate mean­ing that has come to exist between char­ac­ters and the sym­bol­ic mean­ing which is huge­ly moving.