For A Room of My Own, Georgian director and writer Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze re-teamed with one of his leads from Otar’s Death, Taki Mumladze, who stars as Tina. She also co-wrote the script. We first meet Tina wearing a very familiar surgical face mask in the back of a car. While I enjoy the escapism cinema can provide, having most narrative cinema over the last year not be reflective of the reality we’ve been living has felt like a fundamental disconnect. Additionally, while the film kept Covid mostly in the background, its presence was very much felt within the film and further emphasized the theme.
The English title is “A Room of My Own,” and Tina is the one seeking that room. The film begins with Tina moving in with Megi (played by Mariam Khundadze), someone found on the internet. People that move are usually running from something or towards something (and hopefully, if it’s the former, it shifts to the latter). Moving to a new city and finding a place to live/roommates is always hard. Anyone that had done it knows from experience. You add in the pandemic, and it’s made it more difficult. So you know that Tina needed to move. We at least have video calls making it easier to meet your potential roommates from a distance, but it doesn’t mean you can’t still end up mismatched. And that is definitely the case for Tina and Megi. Tina is quiet; Megi likes to party. If there wasn’t a pandemic, they probably wouldn’t have ended up as roommates. But Megi needed to fill a room to cover rent, and Tina needed a room. They each had a need that the other was able to fill.
Megi doesn’t understand Tina’s quiet/reserved nature, and Tina is put off by Megi’s more open lifestyle. One that she’s treated to very early on by Megi walking around their apartment nude. But for Tina, this is all supposed to be temporary. She’s just waiting for her boyfriend to come to the city so they can move in together. But it’s obvious from their conversations (over the phone), that her boyfriend Beka (played by Giorgi Tsereteli) is working up the nerve to end their relationship. Long before he visits and Tina realizes she’s alone on this journey.
Tina began her journey into rooming independence (and finding herself) because of domestic violence. She’s blamed for the results of the domestic violence by her own family, so when she loses her boyfriend, her physical ties to her old world/life really start to crumble, and she seeks comfort in Megi. While Tina’s initial attempts to hang with Megi and her partying crowd are awkward and aborted early, she and Megi eventually find common ground and begin enjoying each other’s company. Their relationship evolves from reluctant roommates to something more.
There is a scene midway through the film when Megi intimately touches an indisposed Tina. Now, while Tina consents to initial touches, Megi takes it further, and it’s unclear whether Tina is in a state to give consent at that point. While they do have explicitly consensual relations later, this start to their sexual relationship felt at odds with the main theme in the film, of Tina taking control of her life/her space. At that moment, she did not express consent, she was not in control of her body/her space. And though Megi stopped her actions when Tina explicitly denied consent (by turning over), I wondered at the scene’s inclusion. Especially, since before anyone could breach the topic of that night’s actions, big news broke that forced Tina to reckon with something else entirely. And Megi was aware of Tina’s previous abuse.
A Room of My Own premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Crystal Globe Competition.
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