Parky At the Pictures (25/4/2025)

(Reviews of April; The Ugly Stepsister; and Wind, Tide & Oar)

APRIL.

Georgian cinema has been on a roll since Dea Kulumbegashvili debuted with Beginning (2020). Now, following Levan Akin's And Then We Danced (2019) and Crossing (2024), Elene Naveriani's Wet Sand (2021) and Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry (2023), and Alexandre Koberidze's What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (both 2021), Kulumbegashvili returns with her second feature, the indelibly disturbing, April.

Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the chief obstetrician at a hospital in Lagodekhi in Eastern Georgia. When a child is still born, the furious father (Sandro Kalandadze) lodges a complaint with the police and forces the head physician (Merab Ninidze) to ask colleague, David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), to conduct an inquiry. The father refuses to accept complicity (in spite of the fact that the pregnancy wasn't registered and the wife eschewed all prenatal monitoring) and ignores David's reassurance that Nina is the best OB-GYN in the clinic, as he knows she performs abortions in the village.

Unable to sleep, Nina goes for a drive and picks up a stranger on the road (Beka Songhulashvili). She tells him she used to visit the area as a child and recalls her dilemma when her sister got stuck in the mud at a fishing pool. Despite Nina being paralysed by fear, the sister survived and is now a happy mother of two. Nina asks her passenger if he would like a blow job, but he's too tired to get erect. Nina lifts her top and allows the man to fondle her, but she turns away when he unzips his fly. When she asks him to lick her, he pushes her face into the dashboard and slams the car door behind him.

Nina visits David in his office to ask him to help her with the inquiry because she knows people are looking for an excuse to fire her. She insists she couldn't have performed a Caesarian, as the woman didn't want one. Indeed, she seemed relieved the baby had died, as she already had enough children on her hands. David warns her not to repeat this and enquires about her love life, as they were once an item. He hugs her and promises to see what he can do.

After looking at a field of poppies, Nina calls on Mzia (Ana Nikolava) because her deaf and non-verbal sister, Nana (Roza Kancheishvili), is pregnant again. Mzia knows her husband would be furious if he knew she had not kept an eye on Nana and asks if Nina can help them. Nina is wary of being gossiped about in the village, but she promises to do what she can.

Similarly, she gives the pill to a 16 year-old bride, whose body is not ready to conceive. With David establishing during a post mortem that the dead baby had a problem with its lungs, Nina has new hope that he will find in her favour in his report. When they meet privately, he asks why she refused to marry him and she insists it would not have worked out. He is now married and his kids are rehearsing for a concert at the hospital. But they still have sex on the floor of his office. Once again, David urges Nina to be careful and suggests letting some of the others do abortions for a while (as they are legal, but often lead to problems with irate husbands or parents-in-law). However, she feels she must do her duty by the women who trust her.

Following a late-night tryst with a rural car washer, Nina performs the abortion on Nana, who lies on a plastic sheet on the house table. A storm breaks and Nina's car gets stuck in the mud and she has to return to the house. Mzia's husband (David Beradze) is having his supper at the table and he invites Nina to join him. He tells his children that this is the doctor who brought them into the world and chides Mzia for busying herself in the kitchen. Complaining that the region needs asphalt roads rather than a school that resembles a spaceship, the man insists on Nina staying the night, as it would be too dangerous to drive. Despite Nina averring that she's not scared, she sleeps over and he gives her a push in the morning to free the car.

Following a nocturnal stroll around a cattle market and a dream in which an emaciated wraith-like mud creature (who appears intermittently throughout the film) embraces David, Nina performs a C-section. She is summoned to the hospital chief's office, where she learns that Nana has been murdered by her brother-in-law, who has been sexually abusing her for years. The police have discovered that the victim had undergone an abortion and Nina admits to carrying out the procedure. David looks on, as their boss informs her that she will have to take responsibility for what she has done. Remaining calm, he also tells her that she has landed him in trouble and has ruined her own life for refusing to obey the law.

She agrees to do whatever the physician suggests. A knock brings the angry husband and his wife, Irma (Tosia Doloiani), who sit to listen to the verdict of the report. It's full of medical jargon and Nina sits with David and their boss, as the couple listen on the sofa. `Perhaps God sends us blessings so that we learn how to overcome despair,' he concludes in an effort to make the uncomprehending pair feel better. As it becomes clear that the hospital has found enough medical justification to support Nina, everyone is suddenly distracted by a loud noise from outside. The film finishes with a shot of the wizened naked figure moving slowly across marshy terrain with snow-capped Caucasus mountains in the distance.

Bitingly critical of the second-class status of women in modern Georgia, this is a troubling and occasionally problematical drama. Ia Sukhitashvili is compelling as Nina, although she is often an invisible presence during some of the most significant scenes. As Kulumbegashvili favours long takes and eschews traditional over-the-shoulder framing or shot-reverse-shot editing, the camera as frequently fixes on the person speaking or listening to Nina as it does on her. Consequently, the viewer is made to feel like an eavesdropper on intimate conversations, while also being reminded that they are watching a film made up of conscious stylistic decisions.

Once again revealing the influence of Carlos Reygadas, Michael Haneke, and Cristian Mungiu in her approach to narrative, tone, and pacing, Kulumbegashvili makes demands on the audience by returning repeatedly the cadaverous figure. This appears in the opening shot and seems to be an oneiric representation of either the trauma that Nina experiences from a prolonged period aborting foetuses or of the guilt she feels at perhaps having terminated a pregnancy while with David. However, no explanation is provided (although a clue could lie in the dread-filled anecdote about her sister and the engulfing mud) and these surreal reveries reinforce the distancing effect achieved by the blocking strategy.

Thanks to Lars Ginzel's mucilaginous sound design, however, they also have a Cronenbergian impact, which can similarly be felt during the close-up coverage of the birthing and aborting sequences. Elsewhere, the soundtrack is filled with heavy breathing, barking dogs, lowing cows, and croaking frogs, as well as lots of mud-, water, and body-related squelching. Matthew Herbert's unsettling psyche-hinting score (which uses bones as an instrument) complements these noises in the same way that production designer Beka Tabukashvili provides cinematographer Arseni Khachatura with the long corridors, spacious offices, and cramped cottages that dictate the camera distances that set the visual tone for the action.

Luca Guadagnino's name among the producers should help the picture gain access to some of the UK's smaller arthouse venues. But, for all its aesthetic quality and thematic potency, this isn't an easy watch, as Kulumbegashvili is not one for compromises. However, the uncompromising rawness of the action and the persistent pugnacity of the assault on the patriarchy make this essential viewing in a way that Coralie Fargeat's over-hyped body horror, The Substance, was not.

THE UGLY STEPSISTER.

There have been numerous screen variations of the Cinderella story that had been coined by Charles Perrault. But none dwells so damningly on a woman's place in the fairytale world or examines conventional notions of beauty with such trenchancy as Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister. It's as though David Cronenberg had gone all Grimm after an all-nighter of Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast (1975), Juraj Herz's Beauty and the Beast (1979), and Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard (2009).

When their widowed mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), marries Otto Von Rosenhof (Ralph Carlsson), daughters Elvira (Lea Myren) and Alma (Flo Fagerli) have mixed feelings about moving to a new house and getting to know their new stepsister, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). Earnest and naive, Elvira is a dreamer, who clutches a slim volume of verse written by Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), whom she has set her heart on marrying. However, Agnes quickly disabuses her about her chances when she has braces on her teeth and a protruding nose.

However, when her father keels over after having disdainfully flicked some birthday cake at Elvira, Agnes finds herself in the scullery after Rebekka learns that her late spouse didn't have a penny to his name and had married her thinking she had an inheritance from her husband. When Prince Julian announces that he will choose a bride from the guests at a ball four moons hence, Rebekka decides to give Elvira a makeover to enhance her chances of landing the heir to the throne - or, at least, a wealthy suitor.

Rebekka is worried that Agnes will catch Julian's eye. But she is in love with her groom, Isak (Malte Gårdinger), and Elvira is appalled when she sees her supposedly chaste stepsister having vigorous intercourse in the stables. Although Rebekka sends Isak packing, she can't prevent Agnes from attending the finishing school run by Sophie von Kronenberg (Cecilia Forss) and Madame Vanja (Katarzyna Herman), who have been charged with selecting students to perform a special dance at the ball.

Elvira thinks she has talent, but Madame Vanja sends her to the back of the class and fawns over Agnes. She is unhappy that her father has been left unburied in the cellar because Rebekka is spending all her money on cosmetic surgery to try and improve Elvira's looks. Having removed her braces with giant pliers, Dr Esthétique uses a chisel to reshape her nose in the most excruciating fashion, as her mother looks on approvingly.

There is much mockery at the school when Elvira turns up wearing a brass protector over her nose. This is also the first thing Julian sees when Elvira chances upon him hunting in the woods with his vile companions, The Feinschmecker (Isac Aspberg) and The Omnivorous (Albin Weidenbladh). But Elvira is too enchanted by the sight of the prince's buttocks (as he takes a leak in a bush) to notice how boorish he is. Indeed, she becomes more determined than ever to win his heart and agrees to Dr Esthétique sewing some false eyelashes into her eyelids. Moreover, she readily swallows the tapeworm egg offered her by Sophia, so that she can keep eating the pastries she adores without gaining weight.

As she becomes more confident, Elvira stops admiring Agnes and becomes bitterly jealous of her. Alma is dismayed by the way her sister has changed and is shocked when she shreds Agnes's ball gown. But all is not well, as Elvira's stomach keeps gurgling and her hair starts to fall out at such an alarming rate that Dr Esthétique has to give her a wig for the ball. But Agnes's dead mother appears to her and presents her with her dress repaired by the maggots who have crawled out of her father's corpse. However, she warns her to leave before midnight, as the magic spell will wear off.

At the ball, Julien is largely unimpressed by the young ladies in attendance. Indeed, he can barely rouse himself to watch the special dance that now has Elvira in centre stage. But he chooses her to be his partner for the first dance and is in the midst of paying her a compliment when his attention fixes on the veiled and late-arriving Agnes. Barging past Elvira, Julien rushes to Agnes and remains by her side for the remainder of the night. Suddenly feeling nauseous, Elvira rushes out of the ballroom and vomits several tapeworm eggs. She returns to the ball in time to see Agnes's face beneath her veil and, when the prince vows to marry the owner of the shoe left behind in her hurry to leave at the stroke of midnight. Elvira hastens home to confront her stepsister.

The pair fight over the white slipper and Elvira is dismayed to discover that her feet are too big to fit inside. In an act of desperation, she takes a cleaver and hacks at her toes. Hearing the commotion, Rebekka leaves her young lover in the bedroom to inform Elvira that she has mutilated the wrong foot for the slipper held by Julian. Sedating her daughter, she hacks off the toes on both feet and puts her to bed.

Waking next morning, Elvira sees her bleeding feet and valiantly tries to make it down the stairs when she hears Julian in the courtyard. But he quickly discovers that the slipper belongs to Agnes and he rejoices at having found his virgin bride. Alma tries to comfort her sister and, when her stomach starts to rumble, she helps yank out the tapeworm before cleaving it in twain. Realising their mother is too busy fellating her beau to care about them, Alma fetches her horse and helps Elvira scramble on to its back so they can ride away and start afresh across the border.

Confounding the maxim that mother knows best, this bleakly comic body horror condemns the complicity of women in their own degradation. The menfolk on display here are all buffoons. Yet they retain control over the opposite sex because they are too locked into ruinous vanities and petty rivalries to seize the moment. For all the sins of the mothers, however, the patriarchy remains reprehensible, as embodied by the anything but charming prince.

Bedecked in Manon Rasmussen's splendid costumes, Lea Myren excels as the anti-heroine, who manages to retain the audience's sympathy in spite of her flaws and follies. Sportingly enduring all manner of indignities and agonies, she is as much a victim of her mother's ambitions as Agnes, who is anything but snow white herself. Indeed, it's amusing to realise that Blichfeldt's approach to the Cinderella story could just as easily have been applied to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejuice, with an extra-ruthless Mrs Bennet seeking to turn her daughters into objects of desire.

The debuting Blichfeldt's script is sharply satirical, but also scabrously witty, as Elvira's immaturity, insecurity, and immunity to cruelty cause her to speak and act before she thinks. By contrast, Flo Fagerli's Alma looks on with a mixture of confusion and compassion that turns to concern the moment she hits puberty and realises she is doomed to share her sister's fate unless she acts decisively. But there's little empathy shown towards the Cinders character, as Thea Sofie Loch Næss's mean girl is no better than she ought to be and she rather deserves to find her happy ever after involves a popinjay prince.

Gloriously photographed by Marcel Zyskind, Sabine Hviid and Klaudia Klimka-Bartczak's production design is as baroque as John Erik Kaada and Vilde Tuv's playful score. The grotesque special effects are less successful, although the tapeworm expulsion does have a certain emetic quality that might cause some to view it through their fingers.

WIND, TIDE & OAR.

Film-maker Huw Wahl has reached niche audiences with his first three feature documentaries, To Hell With Culture (2014), Action Space (2016), and The Republics (2020). But Wind, Tide & Oar, a paean to engineless sailing that took three years to make, should prove irresistible to anyone who likes messing about in boats.

For centuries, boats relied solely on the wind and the tide. Towards the end of the 19th century, however, engines were introduced and they have become the norm when it comes to sailing. But there are those who prefer to adhere to the old methods for reasons ranging from navigational pride and sporting challenge to environmental concern.

In Part One, `The Tide Goes In', Wahl introduces us to his sister, Rose Ravetz from Maldon in Esses, who explains why she has just removed the propellor from her Falmouth Quay punt, `Defiance'. He then takes us to The Mill in Suffolk, where boats of all sizes are taking part in an engineless sailing jolly. The sound of rigging ropes being pulled, anchors being weighed, and sails billowing on the breeze is intoxicating, as are the images of the wooden hulls gliding across the water.

Next we're floating on `Blue Mermaid', a traditional Thames barge that the Sea-Change Sailing Trust uses for excursions along the tidal waters of Suffolk, Essex, and Kent, as well as Old Father Thames himself. On the nearby River Orwell, Stevie Hunt sails `Birubi', a 42ft steel ketch that also happens to be his home. Rose also looks cosy making her own rope with a fire burning and an oil lamp swinging from a hook in her cabin, after she re-launches `Defiance' after its visit to the boatyard. She explains that sailing offers reassurance in an uncertain world, even though it's impossible to control everything once you cast off.

As dolphins swim alongside `Blue Mermaid', where the crew is working in happy harmony, we slip into Part Two, `The Tide Flows Out'. Stevie does a little exploring in his rowing boat. He loves the fact that his days are dictated by nature and the elements rather than human beings. We also meet Jonathan Bailey, who works Cornwall's Fal Estuary Oyster Fishery on `Katrina'. Returning home along Myler Creek, he sums up the ethos of the entire film: `An awful lot of the skill isn't not making mistakes, because you always will because you are dealing with so many variables, but it is knowing how to unpick it when you have made the mistake. This is what it teaches you, doing it without an engine.'

In Falmouth harbour, Giles Gilbert fishes for mackerel on `Dorothy', a self-built vessel that helps supply his shop in the town, `Pysk'. Cornish-based Jude and Jonno Brickhill sail `Guide Me' to a regatta in Brittany, while a group of kids happily muck in during a week-long sailing course, where they get a chance to take out dinghies, as well as working as part of a team aboard a bigger sail boat, Lucy Harris's `Helen & Violet'.

The focus turns on to the ecological benefits of engineless sailing in Part Three: `The Turning Tide'. Two ginormous container ships pass close to each other in the North Sea before Jorne Langelaan explains the principles behind his `EcoClipper' initiative to return cargoes to sailing vessels. Dutch company Fairtransport is already operating `Tres Hombres' and `De Tukker' and we see a consignment of barrels being handled by the crew as Andreas Lackner explains how they are better employers than the freight behemoths who are ruinous for the planet.

A lively shanty at a post-race party brings us back to Rose, as she guides `Defiance' into a temporary mooring. Her confidence on the water is affirmed by Langelaan's contention that it takes great skill and a oneness with the natural world to master sailing without an engine. He hopes the future belongs to the Wind and Weather Wizards, who become one with their surroundings.

Ending on a note of hope and positivity, this is an engaging account of the re-emergence of sail as a commercially viable mode of transport. Much of the attention falls on leisure craft, with Wahl making the most of his fraternal access to Rose Ravetz, as she prepares to return `Defiance' to the water after a four-year restoration. But he seems have been welcomed wherever he went and the geniality of the various sailors adds to the appeal of a film that also pitches its green message with just the right fervour.

While the boats are wonderful, Wahl's technique is also worthy of commendation. Shooting on 16mm with a 1960s hand-wound camera, he achieves images that bring to mind those of Mark Jenkin. Indeed, he even throws in the odd jump cut, as Wahl serves as his own editor. He has also created an evocative sound design that makes flapping sails, tautening ropes, and clanking chains feel as thrilling as the whoosh of the hulls, as they pick up speed through the water. Some of the magic hour seascapes aren't too shabby, either.