A mother screaming in the throes of labor gives birth to a baby that is lifeless and pale, as Georgian director Déa Kulumbegashvili films an actual live birth that produces a stillborn. This stillbirth drives the bare bones narrative of Kulumbegashvili’s sophomore feature, April: a timely examination of women’s reproductive healthcare in the face of cultural repression. Abortion isn’t illegal in Georgia outright, not before the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. But Orthodox customs and attitudes foster a deep culture of shame toward not just abortion but birth control. As our own country sees the strides it had once made in women’s healthcare rolled back, mothers forced to illegally cross state lines in order to receive life-saving care, any perceived “backwards” mores of an Eastern European society can no longer be shrugged off as such by the Western world.
Our protagonist, Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili, star of Kulumbegashvili’s prior feature, Beginning) travels to remote villages administering under-the-table abortions; an open secret among Nina’s disapproving male colleagues. At her hospital, Nina offers little baggies of birth control pills to patients who don’t wish to get pregnant but cannot necessarily control it on their own – like a shy 16-year-old bride, whose mother wonders why her daughter has been unable to conceive with her 17-year-old husband. As Nina explains to the girl, it’s because her body hasn’t yet developed enough to be ready to carry a baby. Birth control will allow her the autonomy to choose when she’s really ready. Though offering warmth to her patients, Sukhitashvili’s performance as Nina is totally hypnotic in its utter inscrutability and lack of expression. There is an implicit drive to understand more of Nina’s perspective, yet she (as well as most other characters in the film) is given very little to say. Instead, the audience must uncover meaning through what is unsaid, through the quiet and solitary life that our protagonist leads and through the selfless actions she undertakes at the risk of her own livelihood and the lives of countless other women.
Tradition and religious disgrace force women to twist themselves into knots seeking relief from pregnancy. Even the mother who miscarried, Nina alleges, seemed to display relief upon seeing her dead child – the prior six months of pregnancy were curiously left unreported to any healthcare facility. But it’s the mother’s conservative husband who is so enraged by the stillbirth, demanding a malpractice inquest against Nina fueled by obvious misogyny and inherent prejudices against the whispers of her abortion services. Meanwhile, Nina is contacted by a patient of hers, Mzia (Ana Nikolava) whose deaf-mute teenage daughter, Nana, has become pregnant. Mzia wants an abortion for her daughter but won’t prevent more pregnancies from happening. Nina advises Mzia to put her daughter on birth control, but she refuses. She advises Mzia herself to get on birth control, citing an abundance of children and lack of resources to care for them – she refuses. All the while, it is clear despite protestations that Mzia knows who raped and impregnated her daughter. In these villages, women don’t want to be pregnant, so they deal with them but they don’t deal with them. Like with sexual abuse, shame and fear guide complacency and silence.
Kulumbegashvili’s camera is unhurried. The opening birthing sequence showcases a standard overhead medium shot, asking the viewers to bear unflinching witness to something many have probably attempted to repress since high school sex ed. But that is not the film’s only live birth scene – Kulumbegashvili shoots a live cesarean section procedure as well. Although these births carry a more documentarian feel to them (the director and crew gained the trust of village locals to chronicle these intimate moments), the fully staged scenes performed entirely by the film’s actors are blocked more abstractly. DP Arseni Khachaturan holds on unsettling moments from askew or awkward angles yet presents them with observational neutrality. A standard gynecological exam only takes up a small fraction of the screen, half of the examination table obscured; a sexual act performed by Nina on a hitchhiker remains largely hidden underneath the bottom of the frame. In the film’s climactic abortion scene, the static camera remains fixated on Nana’s reclined midsection for a grueling period, as the young woman grips her mother’s hand, squirming and wordlessly mewling in agony. Nina’s procedure is just barely out of the audience purview, gaps filled in by the sounds of metal surgical tools clinking together.
Prudent and patient, Kulumbegashvili’s direction is far from disengaging. The unconventional shot composition and excruciating pacing are mesmerizing, whether the camera homes in on a river as rain pelts it from above, or hovers on a conversation between Nina and her colleague, David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), in which he interrogates her for her lack of children. There is also the film’s captivating fixation on breath and impeccable sound design. Scenes in which subjects are positioned at a healthy distance from the camera still carry the overbearing hums of inhales and exhales as if our faces are directly parallel to the characters’. In the midst of Nana’s agony, we hear her erratic gasps; in Nina’s car, her breath is a steady rhythm. Occasionally, the camera does take on a POV expression where it feels like we’re inside the character’s head, like the breath is our own. Sounds of life, unlike that of an unborn fetus. But no sound of breathing is more overbearing than the surrealist moments in which a knotty, faceless entity seems to swap into scenes in direct place of Nina. These moments with the creature – ostensibly meant to symbolize unrealized emotions within our heroine – are interesting at first but overstay their welcome by the third act. They drag and drag to such an extent that any evocative metaphor becomes overshadowed by how much time they needlessly pad.
Aside from these weaker moments, April is overall equal parts disturbing and enthralling, arresting and miserable; a gorgeous slow-burn pressure cooker that culminates in a quiet condemnation of the powers complicit in women’s suffering while offering no catharsis. The film often functions like an endurance test for its audience, not only a work of impressionistic despair but also just plainly difficult in the objective content portrayed in a number of its scenes. Births and abortions are not easy to stomach, but Kulumbegashvili depicts the agony and injustices of motherhood with unwavering resolution. In the end, the content of April is not culturally specific, but chillingly universal.
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter calledThat’s Weird. You can follow her onTwitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.
