NARRATIVE IN TIME AND SPACE

It's night. Ramo and Makho are stealing the railway tracks, are in a hurry... Shalva Sokurashvili's camera nervously follows their movement. This camera is one of the active heroes of the film, which sometimes conveys other characters’ inner state, or sometimes is an objective narrator, goes away and forces you to discover new details as if in an already familiar image, in order to immerse yourself in it.
Director Giga Liklikadze shot the feature film "Pig" in 2019. He is the scriptwriter himself. He's good at it. In 2017, the film "Three Steps" (directed by Soso Bliadze), shot with his screenplay, won the prize for the best screenplay at the International Short Film Festival in Latvia.
Director Giga Liklikadze shot the feature film "Pig" in 2019. He is the scriptwriter himself. He's good at it. In 2017, the film "Three Steps" (directed by Soso Bliadze), shot with his screenplay, won the prize for the best screenplay at the International Short Film Festival in Latvia.
Bachana (Babu Khutsishvili) was deemed unfit for the duty army due to his physical abilities and returns home to the village disappointed. On the way, the bus breaks down and the driver drops off the passengers to help him find the broken part of the bus. Bachana, like all the passengers, does not go back to the road where they have already passed but moves ahead, where they have not been yet, in search of the missing detail, thus, along with the physical, we doubt his mental abilities.
After a long wandering, Bachana is trapped in a blackberry bush of the rail thieves’ untended garden, where the owners of the garden find him. Ramo and Makho (Nika Gozalov, Temo Goginava) realize that they might profit something from a boy who can't defend himself. 300 GEL - this is the ransom that Bachana's parents were offered and the boy was chained like a pig. Now you just have to wait. While waiting, they brew some drugs and stupefy. This is how they avoid problems: probation, debts, poverty, everything... moreover, Makho has two principles: you can't refuse someone water and you can't throw away bread. Therefore, water is offered unconditionally to the captive. Then they offer food and then something else. . .
The characters of the film look like people who have ambled from the outskirts of the city to the village. One can’t understand where they are from, who they are to each other, friends? relatives? maybe brothers. We know that they grew up together. "Do you remember that I used to spank you when you were a child?" Makho tells Ramo. Even now he acts like an elder brother to him. For some reason, one has a western accent in his speech, the other does not.
The heroes’ vocabulary is a subject of separate discussion. An endless torrent of profanity flows from the screen. Characters use profanity not only in times of strong emotion, anxiety or aggression, but also in normal conversation.
The 19th century French neurologist Gilles de la Tourette studied the psychological aspects of swearing and profanity. Tourette's syndrome is called a chronic disease, when a person utters obscene expressions suddenly, without reason, often and obsessively or has involuntary obscene gestures and movements, various tics. Sometimes he involuntarily repeats the sounds and movements of others.
Nothing like that is characteristic for the movie characters. They are completely healthy people and their blasphemy has a utterly different basis. They think like this, they have such vocabulary. It is as if sometimes they even taste the expressions, they are surprised by the content. Their swearing is more a manifestation of pent-up, destructive energy in speech, energy that has not been given a chance to be realized. For example, their unrealized sexual energy manifests itself in this way but when given the chance to move from talk to action, they step back and let someone else do it. Some critics saw homoerotic signs in the relationship between these characters. I think their inner impotence is more visible in the film. They can do nothing, even commit crimes. Just swear. However, one gets the impression that these swear words are also learned (someone behaves like this and I must too). As psychologists say, if a child swears, it is a form of attracting attention. The characters of the film even show a certain infantilism - their cool boyhood ends there when Grandma Vardiko calls and informs about her arrival.
In any case, verbal aggression and obscenity, as its manifestation, is one of the signs of social disadvantage. This is how the film characters live. Moreover, they do not even have the will to look after what their ancestors left for them and preserve. Everything is falling apart, destroying, rotting, and they don't know how to do anything, nor do they want to do it. They turned their parents' house into a pigsty and live like pigs.
The main character also has his own attitude towards pigs. One of his childhood memories is related to how he chased and teased the little Bachana pig. The author showed us this memory, brought to life in a dream, with a flawed image similar to an old video, taken by an amateur. Now the same pig must rescue Bachana from captivity because his parents have no money until they sell the home-grown pig at the market on Sunday or, if the extortionists agree, exchange their own son for the pig. Bachana tolerates everything without a word. He has nothing to say. He observes everything. He didn't say anything when his parents cursed him too but the only thing he got angry about was his sister's swearing. It seems that his relationship with his sister is special for him.
The film was well received by critics. One flaw that is unanimously noted is the scene of bringing the woman home. Dramaturgically, this scene is completely justified - the main character walks a new path, gets experience, smokes a cigarette for the first time, probably swears for the first time, sleeps with a woman for the first time. I would also write like this, I would include a woman's scene in the script and I would try to defend my position, but when the director told me that this scene stylistically fell out of the general flow of the film, I would agree. Here, screenwriter Giga Liklikadze "beat" director Giga Liklikadze.
The film is based on a real story - the author says in all interviews. I think it doesn't really matter whether such or similar story happened or not. Neither has the film lost anything due to the passage of time. The narrative of the film is completely believable, even mind-blowing, which means that it has happened or will happen someday. Such a conclusion comes as a result of the film's cinematic narration, which is amazingly suited to the pauses. A pause during the development of the action is often for the audience to catch their breath, to think about what they have already seen in the previous scenes, to consolidate their impression. Giga Liklikadze's pauses are a separate narrative, a new impression and a new beauty to be understood, which is created by the production designer, Kakha Berelidze, together with the cameraman. It may seem strange, but some scenes with characters seem more drawn out than long shots of still scenery. This is also indicative of cinematic storytelling. Sometimes we observe characters and events up close, sometimes from a distance, against the background of time and space and realize their significance and importance.
This film is like a fairy tale: the hero left the house, walked, walked, crossed the field, crossed over the mountain, jumped, played, slept, crossed ditches, was captured, gained experience, learned something, changed (for better or worse, that's another question) and... instead of returning home, he stayed on the road again. This time, we see how Bachana has left his phone to contact his family and is somewhere near a cement factory cleaning the headlights of big cargo trucks. It seems that there is still a new experience ahead. 
Giga Liklikadze is a director who will shoot important and very interesting films, but as a viewer, I would like only one thing, that the characters of his future films would no longer speak with similar vocabulary.

Ketevan Pataraia,
PHD in Art Criticism (Film Studies),
film critic