Family relations

My Happy Family (MC-86, NFX) was available on Netflix even before it was anointed by the Village Voice as “Best Film of the Year.”  This caught me eye since it's a Georgian film set in Tblisi, where my son goes every summer, to fan out for his archaeological research on the Iron Age transition in the South Caucasus region.  And some of the Georgian social customs portrayed in the film, he had reported first hand.

Anyway, I was predisposed to like this film.  And I certainly did, among my favorites of the year, if not the very best, with the jury still out.    

Directed by a pair who helpfully go by the name of Nana & Simon, saving us the transcription from Georgian (whose script, incidentally, is fascinating to see, halfway between Cyrillic and Arabic), “My Happy Family” is anything but, as you might imagine if you’re familiar with Eastern European films. 

With three generations crammed into a small apartment, 52-year-old Manana is surrounded and hemmed in, with her domineering mother and death-wishing father on one side, and her layabout son and emotional daughter (plus her layabout husband) on the other side, and Manana’s own oblivious husband not on her side at all.  She longs for a room of her own, and gets it, much to the shock and dismay of her family, including her brother and other generations of disapproving relatives.

The cinematography is a wonder to behold, keeping track of chaos within intimacy.  You are there in the midst of this bickering family, and you can only sympathize with Manana’s desire to escape, and applaud the unlikely feminist liberation she achieves, though ambiguously and ambivalently so.  Her escape feels like a small triumph for introverts everywhere. 

The story is essentially told in two trips to the vegetable market, one on an errand for her mother with which fault will inevitably be found, and one for sensuous selection of exactly the delicacy she wants to cook and eat for herself.

Neither you nor I have heard of anyone in the cast, but they are all superbly real.  As the absolute center of the film, however, Ia Shugliashvili has to be singled out.  Manana doesn’t say much - can’t get a word in edgewise most of the time - but her eyes tell all.

P.S.  I guess we’ll have to remember these names, Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross, since they’re clearly the coming thing in Georgian cinema.  Their 2013 film In Bloom (MC-72, NFX) shows the promise that flowers in My Happy Family.  Presumably autobiographical, it follows two 14-year-old girls in 1992 Tblisi, in a period of domestic unrest and pervasive violence following the demise of the Soviet Union.  Again we are immersed in volatile family life, with regional customs like bride kidnapping and drunken toasts to women as a form of patriarchal suppression.  The directors’ style is evident, though not fully matured, but the film’s greatest strength lies in the performance of Lika Babluani, the girl who plays Nana’s stand-in, fawn-like with her black-as-night hair and dark watchful eyes.  Her uninterrupted folk-dance at a wedding is the centerpiece of the film, overshadowing the gun that dominates the proceedings.