Divorce causes feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, fear of the future, and anxiety no matter how good a way out of a difficult relationship is. A married couple, who were considered to be one flesh and blood, are torn apart, and their plans quickly change direction. In a word, everything is turned upside down. The anxiety caused by this chaos lasts for quite a long time, until both of them adapt to the rhythm of a new life and start living in a new reality. Overcoming the difficult barriers caused by separation is associated with equal difficulties for both sexes. Adaptation to divorce takes quite a long time. The sadness caused by the breakdown of family relationships is so painful that, according to psychologists, it can even be equal to the sadness caused by the death of a loved one. There are cases when these depressions and anxieties are so unbearable that one of the parties sacrifices everything for it.
It is this very sadness of this separation and the feelings and pain it causes that are reflected in Tinatin Kajrishvili’s film “Horizon” (2018), which is filled with drama, sadness, and melancholic shots throughout its almost two-hour run. The love, emotions, feelings, and many joys and pains that connected two people are suddenly scattered and lost somewhere in the past. The husband and wife find themselves facing a new reality. Although the film does not show the story of their living together anywhere, we realize from their dialogue that the attachment between them was so strong that even sleeping without each other causes anxiety.
Anna (Ia Sukhitashvili) relatively easily copes with this strong blow but for Gio (Giorgi Bochorishvili), this separation ultimately turns out to be fatal. He cannot adapt to being in a new dimension. He still considers his ex-wife his partner, still hopes to be together and as an admirer tries to please the object of his love. He cannot comprehend his “loss” even when Anna directly tells him that she loves someone else and still tries to win his heart to the end and, falling in love with her, gets the artist to paint her portrait.
Since the director’s goal was not to find the reasons for their separation, his subjective, biased attitude towards the main character is so obvious that his empathy for Gio can sometimes be perceived as excessive. We do not know what led Anna to this decision despite the fact that Anna already has a chosen one with whom she plans to start a family and when a new person appeared in her life. Anna might have also suffered a lot before coming to this decision and only her strong psyche and care for her children did not allow her to despair.
We think less about why and for what we fall in love but we think a lot about where such great love disappears. We fall in love for no reason but the feeling we have experienced for a long time rarely disappears for no reason. Disrespect, coldness, humiliation, unfriendly attitude slowly accumulate and one day, the couple discovers that something has broken between them. Gio is still in love, Anna is no longer, or she has just run away from something and from what is nowhere to be seen. Gio's memories only reflect the difficult moments caused by separation. Although the director tried to look at all this from an "abandoned" man’s position and say that separation is just as devastating for a man as for a woman, the main thing here is still the sadness caused by separation, the victim of which can be both a man and a woman. Although in this case the man is the victim of depression, both parties can be.
Some people resort to entertainment to overcome the crisis caused by separation - to go on a trip, have fun with friends and immediately start looking for a new partner. In Gio's case, the opposite happens. He goes to a dull, gloomy place where he knows no one, where the environment is so gray and boring that all this pushes him even more to immerse himself in his own memories. It seems that even his ex-wife cannot completely “free” him and periodically calls him on the phone, which gives Gio a spark of hope.
Gio’s character really evokes sympathy. He is not an aggressive ex-husband who becomes angry and tries to take revenge on his wife. Although Anna remarries, Gio still maintains a good attitude towards her and suffers the severe stress that is called separation. For Gio, as a designer, a complete transformation of an old, beautiful building into a modern style is as unacceptable as starting a new life. His attitude - to replace the old with the new and completely change what is dear to him - is unthinkable. He does not “betray” the remnants of the past and does not replace them with new ones, just as he does not and cannot betray his own feelings for Anna and remains faithful to her until the end.
An old, dilapidated house by the lake, where rain periodically leaks from the ceiling, a swampy yard, coldness and a gray, mediocre horizon - this gloomy landscape and environment are as close to Gio as his inner state. Tinatin Kajrishvili's cinematic handwriting is clearly as visible here as in her other films. The combination of the film's narrative and visual aesthetics comes into absolute synthesis.
Most of the film is shot on Lake Paliastomi near Poti, which is a direct metaphor for the hard difficulties that the sadness caused by separation itself can cause. Due to the unpredictable nature of Lake Paliastomi, sometimes stormy and sometimes calm, we do not understand its fateful and ominous consequences. In the case of Gio, we also do not understand his inner, stormy worries that lead to his death.
Why did the director choose Lake Paliastomi, where serious problems arise during bad weather? He might have wanted to focus on the hardship of the population living there, who have difficulty coping with the obstacles caused by the natural disaster. In the film, Lake Paliastomi represents a danger for the local population, whose very existence near it causes great discomfort. In addition, this lake has always had bad associations and when we hear about it, we first recall the legend described by Egnate Ninoshvili in his story. It is as if the director is foreshadowing the hero's final end when he finds himself on this lake. Despite the uniqueness of its flora and fauna, Paliastomi is symbolically considered in some places to be the abode of spirits and sometimes a gateway to the otherworldly world. Gio also ends his life near it, and his grave, like that of the rest of those living there, finds its eternal peace on the shore of the lake.
Although the main plot of the film depicts the feelings caused by Gio and Anna’s separation, the director does not limit himself to their lives. There are also old man and woman who live near the lake, Jano, who is divorced like Gio, and Marika, who is homeless. They are connected by spiritual loneliness and support. Those who were spiritually isolated and abandoned by their loved ones found each other and created a cozy shelter for themselves.
The high artistic value of the film is determined not so much by its content, but by its artistic form. The sound direction unusually conveys the drama that follows the entire plot until the finale. Natural noises cause a flow of emotions in the viewer as much as static, silent, ominous shots. The sight of Anna with her fiancé becomes a reason for Gio's inner turmoil, and his deafening heartbeat, which is also associated with the sound of a train, is replaced by a train entering the station with a signal, which suddenly absorbs his feelings.
This is a poetic film, in which the shots tell the story without unnecessary words. The slow movement of the camera and the quiet narrative style of the film completely immerse you in the lake of feelings, the feelings that Lake Paliastomi itself and its swampy shore evoke. Music has a minimal load in the film, and instead of it, natural noises are so expressive and multifaceted that music acquires the most secondary importance based on the film's cinematic aesthetics. The noise of the train and its rapid periodic flashing in the shot make it more expressive. The memory gives Gio's thoughts and feelings greater intensity, and the melancholic, gray landscapes of the lake give the narrative poeticity. To a certain extent, the film can be attributed to the aesthetics of "slow cinema."
The landscape of snow-covered trees and a house evokes a feeling of sadness and melancholy, against the background of which the end slowly approaches the hero. Along with the static shot, the mournful mood is created by the white veil of nature and the background music, which, evokes cold, lifeless, and terrifying associations like the sound of glass music. The horizon, immersed in a gray, blurry landscape is lost in the fog that forms between the lake and the island.
The director does not end the story with the main character’s death. He prefers a more original solution. When already married Anna learns of Gio’s death, the cause of which is the grief for her, she suddenly encounters a different reality. Like a widow, the bereaved Marika, dressed in black, tells Anna shocking news. It turns out that she and Gio were very happy together, were going to get married, and were even planning to build a house in the future. Marika's feminine competition and desire for revenge reach their peak. With this gesture, she directly destroys Anna like a thunderbolt and makes her feel that she was not the only beloved woman in Gio's life. Moreover, she does not even take the deceased to the city for burial.
Anna, with the portrait carried under her armpit, leaves the house in astonishment. The boat slowly moves away from the shore and in parallel montage, the faces of two grieving women alternate: Anna, for whom this story will remain an eternal task, and Marika, who, with a look of winning the mark, "sees her off” towards that blurred, uncertain infinity, which is also an infinite horizon.
Ketevan Ghonghadze
