People experience love shortage. They spend their entire lives in quest of their other half - sometimes they find it, sometimes they don't. When a relationship goes into a dead end, there begins the process of looking for the culprit within themselves but seldom is only one party to blame for the split up. The problem is that mistakes are often not corrected - they are only repeated, and this is reflected in new relationships, and an endless movement in the circle begins. When does love come and how long does it stay? This is an eternal question and has different options to answer. It all depends on the person’s perception. For some, this feeling does not exist, and for most, it interferes with longing and habituation.
Most of modern Georgian cinema is about the search for happiness and love. Directors make films about love, relationships, pain, loneliness. It seems that they do not believe that happiness exists. None of the films has a happy ending. All this might be the fault of the reality we live in. Levan Koghuashvili's film "Blind Dates" (2013) is no exception. Its characters begin their search for love and do everything with solitude and a broken heart. This film does not have a specific genre. It is both a drama and a comedy. The weakness of the dialogues and certain scenes causes sadness and a smile at the same time. It leaves the impression of a short film. Events develop quickly and the topics are not fully developed. Despite the color film, it has only one color - gray. Everything is perceived in this color - the beginning, relationships, cities, the stories of the characters and even the end.
Sandro is a 40-year-old teacher. He is trying to escape from a noisy family and start a new relationship with someone. At first, he doesn't care who this woman will be. Everything is simplified. It is the 21st century and you can meet people through social networks. Iva and Sandro do not miss this chance and get to know the girls from Gori. Only one of the two women, Lali arrives in Tbilisi. At first glance, she is ordinary, unremarkable, she has a difficult emotional background. She cries almost every ten minutes. Her ex-husband is an abusive alcoholic, he does not allow the woman to be happy, and she is also tormented by a feeling of insecurity. Sandro and Lali go to the hotel - here, the viewer might have expected a logical continuation of the story, as it often happens in real life, but nothing interesting happens in the hotel room and the confused man takes Lali to watch women's football at the stadium, where he notices the fateful woman for him, Manana. He sees Lali off in a minibus to Gori, promises to meet her in a week, and returns home.
Returned home and troubled by his parents' questions, the man decides to escape to Kobuleti with Iva. So what if it's mid-November and the weather is terrible? Sandro can't breathe anymore, he wants to get away from everything for a few days and meet someone else there, but his parents won't let him and will interrogate him. Life is ironic. This is also confirmed by the fact that the man who fled the chaos from Tbilisi meets Manana even here. This is where their story begins.
Neither Manana's husband is an angel. He is also a typical abuser who is in prison for the second time. Unlike Lali, Manana doesn't dare to leave Tengo. She wants to love Sandro and be with him, but she can't leave her husband either. Tengo becomes a "black spot" in everyone's life. Whoever he appears with, he turns everyone's life into one big disaster. He is not suitable as a husband, father, or lover. Natia, the cleaner, is expecting a child from him, and he forces her to have an abortion. Tengo respects no one, calling Natia behind her back a degenerate refugee. The director has found all the bad qualities in the world and written them into one character.
The whole film is about how bad males are and how they make women miserable. But even that has the other side. No woman has ever had the courage to confront a man. Sandro's mother is a woman from a village who was taught the rules of conduct by her husband. Her mother doesn't need her daughter-in-law from the village for anything, as if she herself comes from Hollywood. Manana doesn't allow herself to be happy and won't leave her husband. Natia keeps quiet when she is married to someone she doesn't expect a child from. Only Lali is a bit bright spot in this whole story, but she can't do it to the end. In this case, love might be both blind and deaf.
“Girls don’t play football in Gori”-this phrase pronounced by Lali seems like nothing, but in fact it is a hint that women are not strong people for the director. If at least one character escaped the shackles of society and found happiness, this phrase would no longer have any meaning.
Sandro’s character is actually not a good person at all. He simply appears as an angel against Tengo’s background. First, he meets a woman on a social network and takes her straight to a hotel, then he falls in love with a married woman, and finally he is taken home by a woman who has nothing to do with him. He does not have the courage to confront first his parents and then Natia’s family. He does not give up on his promise to Lali either, and they meet again on Friday, after work, even though he did not want to go on a date. His life changes radically from Friday to Friday.
If we consider Sandro from a romantic perspective, he also reminds us of the character from Jemal Karchkhadze's book "Zebulon." Zebulon falls deeply in love with an orphan girl, Nestan, Iese Eristavi’s granddaughter. He cannot defend his love. The woman is betrothed to the King of Kartli, Iskander Khan, and from that moment on, their lives become miserable. Nestan always thought that Zebulon would appear as a savior and take her with him but her expectations turned out vain. A man lacks the courage to have a beloved woman by his side and protect her to the end. He died, not realizing that the reality he lived in was a fairy tale intended for him, and just as he found love, he lost it.
Like Zebulon, who was unable to protect his love, Sandro was also unable to withstand moral contradictions. In both cases, love lost. Nestan and Manana are both women who are waiting for action - in one case, a miracle, in the other - a simple decision. Both of their expectations are in vain. And this expectation is precisely the epitaph that love takes in the modern space: on the one hand, it is an idealized feeling, on the other - powerless and defenseless.
Sandro takes home Natia, who Iva likes and, a new love story might begin with it. But not in the way Sandro had thought of. He also breaks up with Manana and stays alone again. Might he have been born for loneliness? Or is this just another modern Georgian film that does not deserve a happy ending? Behind the heartbreaking love story, unprincipled, weak people are hiding.
“Blind Dates” begins like a letter written about love, but there is still emptiness in the end - none of the characters manage to find peace, neither with the other person nor with themselves, and at the end of the film the viewer is left alone with gray emotions, with the same sadness that haunts each shot. In the modern world, love is often just a longing, an expectation that is rarely fulfilled. It becomes less like a feeling and more like an endless search, almost inevitably followed by failure and disappointment. It turns into an abandoned desire, a broken dialogue, a broken date. Its epitaph is an expectation that is never fulfilled.
The feeling of loneliness and alienation is not just a problem of specific characters but a broader trend of modern society. The development of technology and social networks have created the illusion of closeness and increased the emotional distance between people.
Sandro, Iva, Natia, Manana, Tengo and Lali are lonely characters. Tengo does not know how to behave properly. Or because it is bad to be an example for others, no matter what kind of person they are. Neither love nor people seem to be the problem - the problem is time, which does not have the ability to preserve feelings, and that is why "Blind Dates" leaves the feeling that the greatest tragedy of the 21st century is not love but its impossibility.
Barbare Kalaijishvili
