Directed by Elena Naveriani
A sturdily-built middle-aged woman, Etero (Eka Shavleishvili), is scrambling on a hillside in her wellies picking blackberries. Stepping too near a steep edge, she slips on wet grass and skids, almost falling to the road some way beneath. For a moment she has a vision of the probably fatal fall she only just avoided, and scratched and bruised she returns to her home to clean up. Home is a the very basic village shop in a small village outside Tbilisi, run on tight and minimal lines, where she has lived all her life, previously looking after her boorish father and brother following the death of he mother during her childhood. Now she lives alone.
Something about her near-perilous fall has jolted her spirit, and when old friend Murman the delivery man (Temiko Chichinadze) arrives, she pounces in no uncertain terms. ‘I was hoping for this myself!’ he announces, as they make passionate love in the storeroom.
Among the other women of the village Etero is considered odd, asexual, dull (though useful for buying in their special beauty creams), and when they invite her to decorous tea and pastries and bitch about men and their weaknesses, they cast patronizing glances towards her as if in a club she has no comprehension of. She says nothing as her affair develops clandestinely (he’s married), moving on from sex among the storage shelves to hotel trips away, revelling in her new life, a truly independent woman without the shackles of marriage like the rest.
Screens nowadays are full of bodies, almost always young and beautiful, here Eka Shavleishvili’s Etero is amazing, suddenly magnificent in a way we really didn’t expect from that matter of fact figure bundled up in her sensible clothing, with her splendid heroic profile and green eyes. Oozing sensuality. As the director said, in fact a truly punk feminist.
When Murman gets a job driving abroad she has to make a hard decision about their future, but then a twist at the end alters her whole perspective.
Oh, and a special mention has to be made for those magnificent, mountainous cream pastries, characters in themselves – where were they when I was in Tbilisi?
Seen at London Film Festival 2023
A seat in the dark 