Whatever cruelness you might assign to the month, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April probably has it beat.
Kulumbegashvili’s shattering, sensational film is set in a hardscrabble, provincial region of Georgia, the Eastern European country. Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the leading obstetrician at the local hospital and she leads a punishing life.
In the film’s opening scenes, she delivers a baby — Kulumbegashvili films it from overhead — who doesn’t cry once born. Sterile hallways and men demanding answers follow the stillbirth and the fleshy, bloody images of the operating room. Though Nina has done thousands of deliveries, the father calls for a police investigation. Left alone with Nina, he tells her he knows she gives abortions in the village. He calls her a murderer and spits on her.
Nina experiences the moment with horror and silence, a pervading register in April. Kulumbegashvil’s film is formally composed and rigorously opaque, but it churns with an underlying, aching despair.
Abortion — legal but fraught in Georgia — is central to April. But Nina’s predicament and loneliness stem from something even deeper. Again and again, April places its solitary female protagonist in scenes where every gesture — professional or intimate — is treated as lesser, an imbalance that’s violently and brutally impressed upon Nina.
