Everyone creates a work based on what they know and have experienced, and the plot does not matter. No matter how much they talk, Rusudan Glurjidze's film ”House of Others" (2016) is neither about Abkhazia and its conflict, nor about Abkhazians. This is about the author’s feelings, about the difference caused by a change of your environment, when your lively and bright native city loses its colors, when the bullet shoots past the student’s ear who is on his way to the institute, when buildings once warmed with people’s relationships gets terribly cold and you feel that you have become alienated in your own environment. This is the 1990s. The war in Tbilisi, then in Abkhazia, the IDPs from there and the stories brought by them are unbelievable, about cruelty and dedication. I saw and felt this in Rusudan Glurjidze's film, and it doesn't matter if the author calls it another name. Cold, darkness, the edge of starvation, the sound of guns, funerals, buildings filled with the smell of kerosene and the feeling of walking on fog and not knowing whether the ground will hold you at every next step.
I could see and feel it in Rusudan Glurjidze's film, and it doesn't matter if the author will call it another name. We do not know how the Abkhazians who are settled in the emptied Georgian villages after the war feel and live, we can only assume and that is also based on our own experience. Such an assumption is "House of Others." It is good that the word "Georgians" is never heard in the film. "They" – this is how the characters of the film mention, who do not seem where they are from. Any nationality may be appropriate. This also applies to that female character, whose nationality is emphasized by the spoken language – she is Russian. Such people are everywhere, all kinds of people exist among Russians, Georgians, and Abkhazians. The authors of the film (screenwriters: Rusudan Glurjidze and Davit Chubinishvili) tell us about people in general, and that's good. That's why this movie was acknowledged by foreign viewers. While watching the movie, they don't think about how Abkhazians and Georgians “are depicted," whether the movie tells us real stories or shows its assumptions.
The first impression the film creates is the merit of its visual side (camera – Gorka Gomez Andreu, production designer – Gogi Mikeladze). A faded former paradise – this is the environment in which the action unfolds. "How beautiful" is often repeated to the characters of the film, although one watches and does not want to be in that rainy, deserted, shelterless beauty, where people are gripped by a distant feeling of guilt or sin, they get restless. Some of them are more open to this feeling, some less. Because of this feeling, the hero of the film, Astamur, who came to live in the village with his family, could not rest in his new house. The mystery of these abandoned houses is striking, the dusty and half-dark interiors seem to stubbornly not accept new residents.
Here I remember the story of the people living in the North Caucasus (including Georgians) and how they were resettled in the deserted villages of the deported Vainakhs (Chechens and Ingush) in 1944, and only 13 years later the process of their rehabilitation began. It is true that, according to the story, the Georgians emptied the Ingush houses without a word on the locals return to the their homeland, in which almost all objects were in place, and the live-stock was in the barns with their offspring, but anyway, how did the Georgians feel then, despite the fact that they were not to blame in the migration of these people? Did they walk around the village confused like Astamur or did they work hard like his wife? Perhaps both, although it seems that they did not appropriate the objects of the old owners. They, like the houses themselves, remained someone else's until the end.
Despite the fact that Astamur's character (Zurab Maghalashvili) is listed first in the film's credits, he still fails to fulfill the function of the main character. The film begins with his family arriving in the village, and the audience waits to find out who the main character is, whose story develops the plot, who wants to achieve something, which will either work out or not. But Astamur does not act. He just walks and observes. Throughout the film, he made only two decisions at the beginning and at the end: he arrived and left. Nor have we seen his character change. From the very first scenes, it seemed that he would not be able to adapt to this place. Instead, other characters in the film are active, decision-makers, especially the women in the neighborhood: Ira, Azida, and Azida's teenage daughter. They don't seem to find it strange to live in someone else's house (although everyone has paid money to live in these houses). These women are more worried about lack of manhood: Azida (Ia Sukhitashvili) lost her husband, her daughter lost her father. Dressed as a man, Ira (Salome Demuria) tries to protect her sister and niece, as a father would protect his family in a war situation, with a gun in hand. Besides, Ira is a perfect rifle-woman. On the one hand, the village is empty and it's good when someone comes to live, on the other hand, Ira doesn't want her girls to be in any kind of danger and is ready to burn the houses for sale to prevent someone unworthy from settling there. She says the very phrase that the Georgians themselves hoped to return and therefore did not let their houses burn before fleeing.
After all, all wars come to an end. One side wins and the other loses. Only then will it be revealed what price the winning side actually paid, while the loser is well-aware of what they have lost. We learn from the film that the recently ended war destroyed not only the lives of the losers, but also the lives of the winners. Some are now killed in street fights, some have become vagrant beggars, some are looking for their place, and some no longer believe in love and people. Children are not in a better position either. Parents' situation affects them even more depressingly and confusingly. It's as if they too feel that sheltered loneliness, which sometimes (as in the case of Azida) turns into despair. These wounds take years to heal. Today, actually, years have passed, but we, the viewers and the authors of the film, do not know what is happening there, just as the characters in the film do not know what is happening beyond the minefield, where the birds fly and where the Georgians disappeared.
There is a wonderful scene when an unknown young woman (probably Georgian) dressed in black enters one of the abandoned houses. She brings out some small thing from the house, which touches her heart tenderly. Then we learn that this woman has taken the mined path, which requires a lot of justification to walk peacefully. The woman turns back, and even then the sound of the explosion is heard. It seems she has walked that mined road in peace again.
The director also successfully crossed the threshold, where on one side there is mysticism and an environment inhabited by ghosts or spirits, which will throw you into a completely different cinema, and on the other side, the subjective perception of ruthless reality. Everything here is so real that it seems unreal. In such a skillful creation of the mood, together with the image, the sound and music (Dušan Maksimovski, Aleksey Vorobyov) are of great merit, which accurately express the author's idea. It is audible and inaudible, mundane and unbelievable at the same time, and fits the tempo of the film. Despite this, without changing the pace of the narrative, reducing the film's running time (103 minutes) would have greatly tied it up.
The last scenes of the film are impressive: the staircase of the house in the fog and Ira sitting there in a white dress; a village road shot from above, where lonely women are following each other in the twilight; and again Ira, who crosses the mined road leading to the Georgians and makes us think, is she the main character here?
Ketevan Pataraia
