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Tthere’s a restless, simmering nervous energy to this 1978 Georgian film; it’s a romantic comedy of manners from director and co-writer Lana Gogoberidze with a loose sort of New Wave feel, set in a city for which the term Swinging Tbilisi doesn’t quite fit, but it’s certainly a lively, hip place for fast-paced, hip people.
Georgian actress Sofiko Chiaureli, famous for her collaboration with Sergey Paradzhanov and iconic for her appearance in his The Flower of Pomegranates, plays Sofiko, a high-powered newspaper journalist known for her sympathetic “human interest” articles featuring ordinary women who tell about their lives. Sofiko is always dashing around town with a mackintosh and funny glasses (which make her look a bit like Isabelle Huppert), accompanied by the disgruntled photographer Irakli (Yanri Lolashvili), who may be in love with her.
Sofiko loves her demanding job and doesn’t mind all the readers pestering her for help with everything. But she has problems: her boss wants to move her to another position at the paper: the “editorial secretary” comes with a higher salary but no glamorous interviews – a job that, he pointedly notes, will give Sofiko more time for her family si , which consists of her sick mother who lives with them, her two rambunctious children and husband Archili (Gia Badridze), who cheats on her. Sofiko’s fast-paced life, which Gogoberidze shows us to be stimulating and depressing at the same time, is interspersed with fragments of her interviews and strange flashbacks: she recalls how a woman, furious at her errant husband, suddenly panicked when Sofika suggested writing article “outing” him.
She discovered her husband’s infidelity by seeing him meet another woman downtown, and this film is interestingly similar to Coppola’s The Conversation in that it’s about someone eavesdropping on other people’s lives, like at the same time eavesdropping on her own. There are delightfully surreal, poignant bursts of poetry in the dialogue: a pensive Archilly notes that animals are thin and healthy because they have to walk everywhere, and concludes, “The 21st century will be the century of pedestrians.” He also muses, “Obviously ants can fly, but only when they are in love.” This film itself is often airborne.
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