“They don’t do anything; they just say things.”
An elderly man says to his friend while sitting on the ground in a beautifully illuminated forest overlooking the hills. From the righthand side, a huge pig enters the frame. Behind the men’s back, it sniffs the ground looking for food, and scratches on the trees. This final scene, where these humble men realise that they can’t trust anyone let alone the politicians, grasps the surreal essence of Smiling Georgia. This first documentary of Georgian director, Luka Beradze, was shown at the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival taking place from the 30th of June until the 8th of July 2023.
Georgia 2012, presidential elections are upcoming. The party United National Movement (UNM) launches a prelection campaign called “Smiling Georgia” during which they promise rural villagers to get free dental care. Decaying tooths are pulled out under the spotlights, hands are shaken and toothless kisses are given to the main candidates of the liberal party. Then the result: UNM loses the elections and no one takes responsibility for concluding what they had initiated. Many people are left without teeth or not fitting dentures. They must resort to a liquid diet, some start drinking excessively while others think of creative ways to find enough money to replace their lost teeth.
In Smiling Georgia, director Beradze follows the aftermath of this election campaign in the remote village of No-Name. As metropolitan areas were actually excluded from these measures and peripheries were targeted, few people knew about it. Initially, Beradze wanted to film a small reportage to draw public attention to the matter. But as he started encountering the protagonists the project expanded. With naivety, a bit of bitterness, and mistrust, but always smiling and with a good dose of irony, the protagonists of this political documentary share their stories. A woman recalls how they removed fifteen of her teeth at once, while another very old shares with a shaking voice how they took away the one and only tooth she had left since her late childhood. These very simple stories, told without sentimentalism but rather as bold facts, awaken contradictive feelings in the spectators. At first, they might feel estranged, as well as reassured that such brutality could not happen to them. However, it doesn’t take long until the ironlike taste of blood pervades the viewer’s mouth. Because at least once in a lifetime, we have all woken up in the middle of a nightmare in which we were losing all our teeth. Haven’t we?
The static stills constituting the documentary resemble the mosaic compositions of Pieter Brugel’s paintings, as the director himself acknowledges. To depict the simple archaic lives of the villagers, the scenes are punctuated with many significant details in pastel colours, where humans are yet another element of the landscapes. Frogs, horses, chickens, and pigs are witty and at times sweet companions in the everyday life of the farmers. The spectators follow their activities, which unfold slowly under the camera’s discreet observance. A woman in a greenish room cooks, two kids play on a floor next to a fireplace surrounded by leaves-patterned tapestry, two pink wrinkly hands clean the corn which looks like teeth, a man on the lake’s shore reflects that “he is tired of loving Georgia”.
This monotonous rural life is however interrupted by hostile and unnatural presences. First, the politicians campaigning for themselves, and then the journalist pretending to help the disillusioned villagers. Those characters seem like a degeneration of humanity, unrelated to the rest of the cosmos. They appear and disappear wrapped in shiny auras, blabbing non-sense. In Smiling Georgia all these diverse contrasting elements overlap and do not really follow a coherent narration, which is quite repetitive. However, the balanced soundtrack of Georgian composer, Alexandre Kordzaia (Kordz), keeps it all together. Smiling Georgia is like a role play, in which archetypes clash with modernity.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.