Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2020) (Patreon)

This is a film that is probably less suited to home streaming than anything else I've seen so far in 2020. It really requires the complete, enveloping atmosphere of the darkened cinema to fully accomplish what its maker sets out to do. I myself came away from watching Beginning with a deep ambivalence, trying to reconcile its formal organization with what I initially perceived as a kind of emotional ruthlessness, as if its maker, Dea Kulumbegashvili, were exemplifying or even amplifying the misogyny that Beginning is meant to analyze. 

But in fact, Beginning is a film that has at least two major themes woven throughout, and part of its strangeness has to do with the fact that those themes are, to some extent, socially incompatible. On the one hand, it's a film about religious persecution, and the arrogant lawlessness that dominates in certain backwards communities. And on the other hand, it is a portrait of a woman in personal crisis. She is lost, possibly in the throes of depression but certainly dissatisfied. And Beginning demonstrates that there is no place for individual struggle (certainly not a woman's) within a tribal conflict.

From its opening shot, Beginning announces a debt to Michael Haneke. Later, we will see traces of Chantal Akerman and (co-producer) Carlos Reygadas. We do not know why the small-town Georgian community (somewhere far outside Tbilisi) hates the Jehovah's Witnesses so much that they want to firebomb them out of existence. This is never addressed. But we learn that Yana (Ia Sukhitashvil), who is married to the sect leader David (co-writer Rati Oneli), has trouble living up to his ideal of a demure, supportive preacher's wife. "You are an awful person," he tells her, half-jokingly, when she cannot immediately snap out of her shock at the last round of anti-church violence they've sustained.

Yana wants to leave the town, but David insists that they must stay where they are not wanted, because it is important for his career. So she moves around in a bit of a daze, as though she has turned off all emotion. She scares her son Giorgi (Saba Gogichaishvili) while on a walk in the forest by very convincingly "playing dead" on the ground. While David is away on church business, she is often seen sitting alone in the dark, her hands nervously positioned, as though she is contemplating masturbation but is either too sad or ashamed to succumb to the urge. And, at a pivotal point in the film, she makes the mistake of letting a supposed police detective (Kakha Kintsurashvili) enter her home, not so much out of trust but exhaustion.

At first, I was nonplussed by Kulumbegashvili's approach to Yana's overall plight. Beginning struck me as a film that was all about placing someone in a subaltern position and relentlessly kicking the crap out of them, in order to drive home the "point" of misogyny. But on reflection, I think something more complex is happening here. Yana is in a state of uncertainty, and there is no place for this uncertainty in her world. She may always have had doubts about her husband's religion. (Her visit with her mother and sister suggests as much.) But she is also partly a believer, and so she does not trust her own desire for escape. 

This means that, despite her obvious innocence, Yana cannot help but feel on some level that she has brought her fate on herself. David, of course, is more than happy to reinforce this view, since he mostly sees Yana as an extension of himself. As a mother, Yana is also ambivalent, another outlaw emotion she clearly cannot permit herself. She loves Giorgi, but also knows that within David's religion, he will eventually become another patriarchal oppressor. So in the end, Beginning is about the impossible rupture of women's subjectivity within a space that only offers a sliding scale of male prerogative. She can be despoiled like a piece of meat; she can be a demure helpmate; or she can disappear completely.