Man is a small, pitiful creature. He only thinks about his own well-being. He has a big ego that he satisfies and feeds all his life, he doesn't look beyond himself, he doesn't care what happens to others and how he will be, he doesn't want to bare his feelings and care for the other person, he doesn't recognize other people's problems until it affects him directly. He thinks that the more he puts his "self" forward, puffs out his heart and walks like that, the better he will appear in others’ eyes. People, sometimes, are so weak that they build their happiness on the misfortune of others and are not afraid of the return of karma.
Ioseb (Soso) Bliadze's film "Otar’s Death" (2021) is exactly like the phrase: if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act of the play, it should be fired at the end. One of the characters in the film is a certain Otar, who must die before the end of the story.
The film begins with a mother-son relationship that is broken. They seem to have no communication with each other. Keti has her own life, and her son, Nika – his own. Both are independent individuals. It seems as if they are not mother and son, but strangers living together by chance. This part of the story is too far from reality. The fact that mother and son have a similar relationship with each other is unbelievable. For example, Keti borrows money from Nika to go out for fun, while the guy stays home, cleans, does the dishes, and prepares clothes for the next day. Everything happens as if it were not happening here and now, that is, in the 21st century, but in a parallel universe. Keti prefers to spend time not with Nika but with her friend, drinking a lot of alcohol at the club. It does not matter for her what her son feels. She has never asked him what his mental state was. Keti is the best example of a bad mother in this part of the story. If the director wanted to show how the mother-son relationship is, he managed it well.
At the beginning of the film, there was a feeling that the story should develop along this line of family relationship and end like that. The only thing that gives hope of variety is the title itself "Otar’s Death." As if he is the only chance to "catch" the audience. The plot is easily predictable. To save the picture, the director needed an explosion, and finally he did it. The film is divided into two parts: Keti and Nika’s family confronts Otar’s family. The second part is more interesting than the first.
If the movie itself started from the moment of the car crash, it would not lack much. The second part lacks development and details. It is not clear when Otar's family demanded the money. This part is cut out from the general picture. And the action develops directly through the process of finding money. It is ironic that Otar costs only thirty thousand GEL. This equivalent is proportional to Tamar's well-being. The woman always wanted to move from the village to the city but she did not have the money for it. She was tired of the mud in the village, she wanted to walk in the beautiful streets, and as soon as she got a chance to leave the village, she grasped it.
The episode of Otar's revival is similar to one of the popular episodes of Nana Mchedlidze's famous film "Imeretian Sketches" (1979). Soso Bliadze brought some of the viewers back to their childhood and reminded them of their youth.
Otar's family is ready to bury him. They have already got the money, the dinner and music are ordered, but there is one problem – they don't have a dead body. When Otar woke up, Tamar seemed to have lost hope and almost killed the man with her own hands. The question is: is it funny rather than satirical? Is it a comedy or a tragicomedy? Maybe it's just funny.
The only real victim is Nika. He is morally dead. He is being beaten but it doesn't hurt anymore, he screams, but nothing is heard, no one listens. His mother is trying to solve the already ruined case, the outcome for him. The main culprit is her. If she had been a better mother, the second part of the movie would not have existed. Nika would not sit behind the wheel, he would take Keti home, and so the full-length film would turn into a boring short one.
It can also be said that "Otar's Death" is one big masquerade. It is impossible for a person to be in a deathly sleep for several days and then suddenly wake up. The fact that a policeman would come to the scene of the crime, take photos of everything and wait for money to be deposited, forge a death certificate based on someone else's wish and record a heart attack instead of the real cause, is unbelievable. Especially when everything is digitized. That part is an illusion in which Tamar doesn't realize that Georgia is a small country, the village she lives in is even smaller and cannot hide the living Otar. Someone will definitely tell Keti the news and the police will make her bear responsibility.
It is also possible that Tamar herself dreamed everything and all the actions that were carried out took place only in the woman's mind and were part of her illusion. She was so lost in her dreams that she lost the line between the real and the unreal world, she wanted to move to the city to live there so much that she imagined it all.
If everything is reality, then the question is, which side is further from humanity, Otar's family or Keti's family? Probably, Otar’s family more. Its members made a woman pay for a living man, sacrificed a young boy to be labeled a murderer. Otar was valued not at two or three thousand, but at thirty thousand, and Keti was given a day to collect the money. Finally, Otar had a good sleep and ate early morning food cooked for his funeral. Now they can play his death a second time, then a third time, and start a family business.
Barbare Kalaijishvili
