Dea Kulumbegashvili wastes no time establishing the aesthetic extremes to which her film April will stretch. The opening shot lingers on a lurking humanoid creature in a lightless, liminal space. Arseni Khachaturan’s camera remains still and detached while observing this figure with droopy—and seemingly decaying—skin as it lumbers into the shadows.
The mysterious entity reappears sporadically throughout the film, but the focus of April quickly shifts toward a more familiar nonverbal being. Only an interstitial sequence of pouring rain separates that abstraction from a jarring take of realism where a god’s-eye view captures an unsimulated live birth in a delivery room. Within 10 minutes, Kulumbegashvili bridges a stylistic range from Jonathan Glazer’s formalism to Cristian Mungiu’s naturalism.
While April, Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to Beginning, may be a film defined by its contrasts, the filmmaker never presents them as contradictions. Any paired oppositions in the film—life and death,...
The mysterious entity reappears sporadically throughout the film, but the focus of April quickly shifts toward a more familiar nonverbal being. Only an interstitial sequence of pouring rain separates that abstraction from a jarring take of realism where a god’s-eye view captures an unsimulated live birth in a delivery room. Within 10 minutes, Kulumbegashvili bridges a stylistic range from Jonathan Glazer’s formalism to Cristian Mungiu’s naturalism.
While April, Kulumbegashvili’s follow-up to Beginning, may be a film defined by its contrasts, the filmmaker never presents them as contradictions. Any paired oppositions in the film—life and death,...
- 9/29/2024
- by Marshall Shaffer
- Slant Magazine
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