Cinema art differs from other fields as it is the most open field to everyone. Anyone, a representative of any profession can fit into the role of a director and this is a completely usual thing in the history of cinema. Franko Zeffirelli was an architect, Otar Ioseliani was a mathematician, and Christopher Nolan was a philologist of the English language. All this is explained by the fact that cinema needs as much life experience as music does. The famous musician, Joe Zawinul, tells his colleagues that instead of rehearsing, they should go to a bar, meet girls, have fun... live a short life because later they will shift everything into music. So is cinema. A director must live in such a way that he can later tell a story from his own experience. In contrast, with the film "The Drummer" (2022), Kote Kalandadze tries to narrate a story about a musician who cannot tell us his own life.
The film is about a young drummer, Niko, for whom music is what he loves to do the most, although there are responsibilities that force him to work in a factory to earn money and take care of his sick father. At the same time, he plays in a band where he doesn't feel very comfortable because of the genre framework. Instead of living without music, he prefers to play the music he doesn't like. At a glance, the film presents the mysticism of the character, a rebellious solitary soul behind an introverted body, waiting for the moment to rise like a phoenix. But before that, he puts his "rebellion" on paper in the form of a story, the main character of which is ronin. To what extent Niko is his own fictional hero, we will find out at the end of the film, if we understand the course of the story and its labyrinths at all.
I don't think the film is difficult to percieve, it's just that all parts are abandoned midway. Finally, the director tries to somehow connect the beginning, middle and end parts together. He does that but what matters is what he shows us over the course of the rest of the movie. How a musician inadvertently became a "drugs dealer," or how he fell in love with a girl, or how he adores his true love, a percussion instrument that he has no money to buy. I couldn't understand why the story line of the sick father, which the director showed us at the beginning of the movie, is not shown. The story is like one big mixture, where the ingredients are not well prepared, yet when tasted, the dish seems an imitation of what it is.
This movie is really like the street cinema of the 2000s, when the directors showed themes where street life and crime dominated. This movie also shows the artist’s fate in the "concrete jungle." The director has chosen the same aesthetics. Costumes, locations... I can't say the same about the dialogues. In this aspect, the film reveals the author's inspiration for originality, in which he succeeds. However, everything is so original that it turns into one big bad taste. From a man in his 50s (whom the police ask to give the names of drug dealers), I think it's inappropriate when he says, "Do you know why the turtle ninjas would fight Shredder, four against one? Because they had a nasty teacher." I think the director's intention at this point was to see the character as a knowledgeable and highly educated person of the 1990s American pop culture but taking into account the overall picture, it turned out that we can see a man in a middle-aged crisis, who is obsessed with cartoons due to childhood nostalgia.
The director's idea of what he wanted to say with this film can be said in four words – "the fate of the creator in a dystopian world." There is "something" in it that is more than these words. I mean the musical genre construction of the film. If we calculate the film in this thesis, we can say that "The Drummer" is "post-punk" in terms of genre. Scatterbrained construction, free, endlessly moving to another segment and constantly rebellious, but this is cinema. Such a decision may be considered exotic, even necessary to make the field more diverse, although it should be defined for whom it is being done. If the film was for film professionals, such a decision would be understandable, but when the film goes to cinemas and the director wants the work to be seen by the general public, which longs for a national product, there should be attention to other aspects.
The film director, Kote Kalandadze, is a musician, that's why it can happen that the plot chaos is the fault of musical thinking, when you can change the rhythm of the composition with just one chord, which requires more than one episode in the cinema. Moving from topic to topic in visual narration requires a lot of work and depth, if the author wants to do it with one stroke, with a small nuance. And "The Drummer" lacks exactly that, more clarity or depth of thought as to why topics change so quickly. It can be called "author's cinema", but when the author does not say anything as the image of the main character in the film, it is difficult for the audience to enter the plot labyrinth to make any sense. Constant riot, constant rebellion can be seen as a negation of the film and, at the same time, a positive side. It also confuses the viewer, making the film more complex and incomprehensible, although this is exactly what gives the film its main aesthetic. Thinking about what's next.
I can't help but focus on Lasha Tskvitinidze, who plays Niko’s role, and who clearly did his job. He exactly managed to show the image of a young man who is deprived of everything, who has nothing left in the society where he lives and finally starts to rebel. At a glance, it was simple, but difficult to do, at the same time, nothing and everything at the same time.
Also very interesting is the work of cameraman Vasil Dolidze, who very well captured the aesthetics of the "underground" world and was able to make it more authentic through the eyes of a film camera, which really exists among us. He also did not forget the style of the 2000s, which gave the film more meaning. The merit of the cameraman is that he was able to understand the script the best and grasped the magical realism that most likely the screenwriters: Kote Kalandadze and Keko Chelidze had in mind, because when watching, we really do not see the difference between the real and the unreal world, which is not in the film, but it also exists in reality.
"The Drummer" could have been one of the best Georgian films of recent times with its rebellious spirit and aspirations, but what happened was that, in the end, we got a low-quality film that left many viewers disappointed. I will borrow Francois Truffaut: "There are no good and bad films, there are bad directors", which, unfortunately, is true at this particular moment, because the story that unfolds in the film could have been conveyed more interestingly by the director, without any unnecessary twists and turns.
Saba Makharashvili
