Beginning (2020, Dea Kulumbegashvili) (Patreon)

61/100

Dance 3, Looks 10. That's admittedly a tad glib, as it's only toward the end that Beginning shifts fully into the sort of bleak-o-rama mode that I tend to find more punishing than illuminating; for a while, it seems of a piece with Verhoeven's Elle, focused on someone who's much too singular (verging on weird) to come across as a mere victim. Ultimately, though, the film goes more or less where I'd feared it might, even if I didn't guess the specific drastic action that gets taken. Left me with a sour taste, despite the arrestingly surreal epilogue. (I've read three or four different interpretations, all of which seem as if they could be valid. But just having it there at all makes a world of difference.) I'm in a forgiving mood, however, because Kulumbegashvili's compositional sense is the most impressive I've encountered in some time—so much so that I spent a lot of this movie quietly gasping. It's not just me being horny for Academy ratio, either, though that choice certainly doesn't hurt any. My notes are mostly just descriptions of shots. Yana riding the bus, leaning forward in her seat so that half of her face gets cut off at frame right, with the hands of an unseen passenger in the seat behind her grasping the back of her seat. Overhead view of a baptism that would be banal were it not for tree branches jutting in from the offscreen shore. (That may not sound exciting, but it looks so remarkable that I briefly wondered whether it's wholly manufactured, with a couple of crew members just holding detached foliage in perfect position.) There's a police station hallway that could have been airlifted from any Roy Andersson movie. And it's been a long, long time since I've seen a director deploy fixed-frame detachment with an eye toward making your flesh crawl when the camera finally moves for the first time. (Every camera movement—I think there are only three—is horrifying or disturbing to some degree.) Again, I don't love where the movie lands, wish Kulumbegashvili had found a less programmatically despairing runway. But I can't wait to see her next picture, and this is gonna be my annual Skandies vote that receives a ton of Director points while being absent from Picture. (Last year's: The Vast of Night.)