The visually arresting drama “April” is filled with naked and clothed female bodies that are, in turn, possessed by desire, racked by pain, and isolated by convention and otherworldly mystery. It’s a heavy, serious and studiously elusive movie filled with handsome images and troubled by the inexplicable presence of a humanoid creature in weird female form. This entity gives “April” a supernatural sheen, yet the movie is rooted in the material world, in the here and now, in flesh and fluids. Its concern is the haunted faces of women struggling to care for the children they already have and seeking to terminate the pregnancies they don’t want.
These faces often turn to Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician who works in a rural hospital in the country of Georgia. Sharp, empathetic, determined and tightly coiled, Nina has the sober confidence of a battle-tested veteran. She has also attracted the kind of resentment that professional women at times endure through no fault of their own. She lives alone and, at first, she seems OK with this even if she doesn’t seem to have friends, only patients and a former lover. Still, loneliness clings to her like a shroud; it’s as palpable as the danger she faces when she drives off to perform an abortion, which she often does in people’s homes.
“April” was written and directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, who likes minimal dialogue, long takes, narrative ellipses and really big bangs. There’s one near the start of her feature directing debut, “Beginning” (2020), set largely in the aftermath of a church bombing. In “April,” it’s the death of an infant during childbirth that shakes up this world. The birth scene is genuine — there are two in the movie — and it jolts the story into gear. The hospital begins an investigation, drawing unwanted attention to Nina’s work quietly providing abortions. (The procedure is legal in Georgia, but stigmatized.) She fights back, insisting that she did nothing wrong. “Other than my job,” she says at one point, “I have nothing to lose.”
It’s a sad, persuasive line, and a memorably blunt admission. Even so, Nina sounds more matter of fact than anguished or desperate, even if the person she’s talking to is her ex, another doctor, David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who’s been tasked with leading the investigation. What’s most notable about this exchange isn’t what the two characters say and the emotional restraint you hear in their voices. Rather, it’s how Kulumbegashvili stages and shoots the scene, which begins with Nina offscreen and the camera solely trained on David, who’s hunched over on a couch in a cheerless hospital room. Only partway through their conversation does Nina enter the shot, standing still as David rises to embrace her.
Here and elsewhere, Kulumbegashvili takes a modestly stylized approach to a seemingly ordinary setup, which nibbles away at the overall realism. Nina and David sound comfortable with each other, but the staging suggests there’s a chasm separating them. When he wraps his arms around her, it takes a few beats for her to fully return his hug. It’s as if she were out of practice, or a performer briefly flubbing her cue. Her physical stiffness is as telling as some of the dialogue, which fills in a bit of their back story. Kulumbegashvili, however, isn’t interested in rekindling their romance. Her focus is on Nina, who — as the investigation develops and other characters enter — comes into view, even as she becomes increasingly enigmatic.
The hospital inquiry gives “April” a bit of narrative tension, but Kulumbegashvili is primarily concerned with articulating Nina’s interiority and expressing the character’s existential estrangement from the world around her. She’s obviously unsettled and melancholic, and one of the few times she seems at peace is during a sequence in which she walks through a field carpeted with spring growth. As red poppies gently bob, you hear the wind, the whirring insects and the rhythmic crunch of Nina’s footfalls. Here, nature serves as a respite, although it’s noteworthy that the filmmaking — the trembling camerawork, the precise sound design — impresses you more than the flowers and the gathering clouds, harbingers of a coming storm.
“April” is easy to admire, but Kulumbegashvili’s use of art-film conventions can be wearyingly familiar, especially when the leisurely pace turns to a crawl. By turns, she pushes and pulls at you, toggling between abstraction and obviousness as she fills the screen with bodies. Among these is that creature, an adult-size enigma with sagging breasts and obscured face whose presence is never explained. It may be how Nina sees herself, it may be a cosmic visitor, a demon or the eternal (exhausted) feminine. Certainly, it adds tang, though more striking — and more effective in transmitting the movie’s interest in power and gender — is the night scene in which Nina wanders a field surrounded by men and cows, finally stopping before an agitated, symbolically freighted bull. Nina doesn’t speak; everything has already been said.
April
Not rated. In Georgian, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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