April Review
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature April follows Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician whose methods come under scrutiny after she delivers a stillborn baby. In addition to delivering babies, Nina also performs secret abortions, and the baby’s grieving father threatens to reveal this, putting her career in jeopardy. With poetic imagery and prolonged static shots, the film is a bleak tale of a woman silently fighting for women’s reproductive rights in rural Georgia.
The film begins with a monster, who quietly re-appears between scenes; a faceless, naked and distinctly female creature that silently crosses the frame, alike to the Pale Man from ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, or the “creature” at the end of ‘The Substance’. Is it a physical embodiment of a monstrous femininity? Perhaps the looming guilt of our protagonist, or the judgment of an unforgiving patriarchal society, which condemns her actions? Unlike Coralie Fargeat’s darkly comic body horror, Kulumbegashvili’s film is devoid of any humour (or any joyful emotion at all), and is as bleak as the dark roads Nina drives down at night, soliciting sex from men she picks up along the way.
“No one wants to do abortions. But someone has to do it”, Nina tells her colleague, and her character resolutely follows this moral duty throughout the film. Abortion is legal in Georgia until twelve weeks, but the political and religious pressures result in most clinics refusing, and many labelling Nina a “murderer”. Procreation is clearly encouraged in the town, with abortion frowned upon and contraception not readily available. We see Nina discreetly give the contraceptive pill to a 16-year-old who is not ready to start a family, and perform an abortion on a vulnerable teenage girl who has been raped.
April incorporates handheld camera and long, meandering shots, with very little dialogue. From a graphic, real-life childbirth scene to lengthy interludes of deserted landscapes, the scenes are painfully long, yet effective. There is an excruciatingly uncomfortable abortion scene, in which the static camera remains fixed on a young woman’s torso for ten minutes. We hear the clatter of Nina’s tools and the whimper of the deaf-mute teenager as she lies on a plastic sheet atop her family’s kitchen table. The silence in the film is piercing, and echoes the deafness of a society surrounding the topic of reproductive healthcare.
A sustained sense of sombreness and underlying dread is frequently juxtaposed with moments of vast natural landscapes, depicting both the beauty and brutality of nature. There is a poetry to these shots, noticeably preceded by those of discomfort and despair. A shot of the nameless monstrous creature is followed by cherry blossom against a blue sky, and an abortion scene by ominous grey clouds over a vast field of yellow flowers. These welcome, albeit brief moments, allow the viewer a much-needed intake of breath and a sense of expansiveness and life amongst the seemingly unending bleakness.
Under the shadow of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, April is a timely examination of women’s reproductive rights and the continuing battle to have women’s voices heard. While it is not a film I will hurry to watch again, its sobering, thought-provoking power lingers in the mind like the film’s insidious monster.
★★★★
In UK cinemas now / Ia Sukhitashvili, Kakha Kintsurashvili, Merab Ninidze / Dir: Déa Kulumbegashvili / BFI / 15
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