Cinephiles would do well to store the name of the director of Beginning in their memory banks. Dea Kulumbegashvili, a 30-something Georgia...
Cinephiles would do well to store the name of the director of Beginning in their memory banks. Dea Kulumbegashvili, a 30-something Georgian filmmaker, has crafted one of the most hauntingly beautiful first features since Werner Herzog’s Signs of Life back in 1968.
A real love for the medium irradiates Kulumbegashvili’s debut, which tackles complex themes and concerns a conflicted couple isolated from society as well as themselves. Utilising a minimalist aesthetic comprising lengthy single takes (a characteristic largely absent from movies nowadays), the script, co-written by Kulumbegashvili and producer and lead actor Rati Oneli, is a bold departure from established storytelling norms. The 130-minute film is being streamed on Mubi.
Imbued with fierce emotional intensity, the narrative gets underway with a spectacular opening sequence set in a prayer hall where a marginalised community of Jehovah’s Witnesses has congregated to listen to their religious leader (Oneli, appropriately overbearing). Before his sermon is over, the place is set upon by unknown extremists. The burning of the building recalls a similar protracted scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film The Sacrifice (1986), in which flames engulf the protagonist’s house.
In a series of startling ellipses, the minister is elided almost completely from the rest of the film. This then shifts the focus to his...
