April – first-look review

For ten whole min­utes, Geor­gian direc­tor Dea Kulum­be­gashvili holds her gaze — and her cam­era — still. In the frame, the back of a nurse, and a naked woman’s body stretched atop an impro­vised oper­at­ing bed made out of a worn-out din­ner table. There are three women in this scene, the third being obste­tri­cian Nina (Ia Sukhi­tashvili), whose skilled hands work at retriev­ing the embryo grow­ing inside the young girl. We hear met­al tools clink, their sharp sound made ever sharp­er against the soft­ness of leak­ing flu­ids and skin brush­ing against skin. We hear words, too, cut­ting through pri­mal grunts, sparse and objec­tive. The girl needs to keep still. Almost there.

In his sem­i­nal poem The Waste Land, T.S. Elliot famous­ly calls April ​“the cru­ellest month,” but spring­time has rarely looked as bleak as it does in Kulumbegashvili’s elu­sive, eerie sopho­more out­ing. On the sur­face, this is the sto­ry of Nina, whose mis­han­dling of a patient’s labour result­ed in the still­birth of a baby boy. She now faces scruti­ny not only from the hos­pi­tal she works at but also from the griev­ing father who threat­ens to expose her illic­it activities.

It is an open secret that Nina sneaks patients the con­tra­cep­tion pill and per­forms illic­it abor­tions in the small vil­lages near­by. Although a sec­u­lar coun­try with laws that allow abor­tion up to 12 weeks, Geor­gia has a major­ly Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian pop­u­la­tion, which means that the laws on paper are not always the ones of the land. Many of the women who come into Nina’s care are girls made moth­ers far too young, ush­ered into a life of forced pro­cre­ation they know they won’t be able to escape from.

When con­front­ed with the dan­ger of her under­ground prac­tice, Nina is quick to insist that, were she not to do what she does, some­one else would. But much of April is about the oppo­site truth — it is the dan­ger, much more than any burn­ing sense of duty or moral­i­ty, that seems to feed the rest­less crea­ture trapped with­in Nina. Kulum­be­gashvili weaves in dis­turb­ing images of an ema­ci­at­ed crone through­out the film, see­saw­ing between the placid­i­ty of open fields and the dark­ness of the angled cor­ners of the doctor’s house, where this alien being often lurks. Is this how Nina sees her­self, drained of life after years of death? Has see­ing the hor­rors of others’s bod­ies blurred her per­cep­tion of her own?

The answers to this rid­dle are as slip­pery as Nina her­self, a woman of con­tained poise but also stag­ger­ing self-hatred. She picks up strangers by the road on her long dri­ves into the bow­els of Geor­gia, all too aware that the fur­ther she is from the sani­tised walls of the hos­pi­tal, the fur­ther she is from the per­ceived safe­ty of civilised soci­ety. She mat­ter-of-fact­ly offers to blow a guy off, and is just as casu­al in her request for rec­i­p­ro­ca­tion, soon find­ing out that very lit­tle sep­a­rates the ela­tion of plea­sure from that of vio­lence. Her rela­tion­ships are just as strange — she speaks of no fam­i­ly or friends, and the only con­nec­tion in her life is David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), a doc­tor at her clin­ic with whom she was once involved. It is as if Nina walks the world gnaw­ing at a fig­u­ra­tive umbil­i­cal cord, intent on detach­ing her­self from those around her.

Despite strik­ing, haunt­ing imagery — includ­ing two graph­ic, pro­longed child­birth scenes — April is, at its core, a film about what we don’t see. Lars Ginzel’s rich, pre­cise sound design immers­es one into this fable-like land­scape, where all there is to hold on to is sonance. It is a dis­ori­ent­ing, all-con­sum­ing sen­so­r­i­al expe­ri­ence and made all the much bet­ter to those will­ing to sur­ren­der to its mysteries.