Society has a hard time accepting different people. They try to make you like them and make you have nothing special, they don’t accept new things, they drown in a world full of dogmas and shackles that they suffocate. Monotony is like a noose around their necks and they can’t breathe. If they notice that you’re not like them, they scold you and don’t hesitate to throw stones at you. This is not just a Georgian problem, it’s the same in other countries too. It’s just that because it’s about your native country, reality is perceived more painfully.
“You’re more talented than me, Merab. You have to leave, you have no future here, do you understand?” - Running away is not always the solution. Sometimes you have to stay and fight for your place, but staying has to cost you something.
Levan Akin's film "And Then We Danced" (2019) attempts to describe the difficulties of relationships and show the public that not everything is as it seems from the outside. The dancers work tirelessly every day, fully understanding the essence of dance, but their fate is decided by someone else. Someone who, based solely on their own opinions and values, chooses who to leave in the ensemble and who not. Dance is not a simple movement for them. It expresses a person's painful state. Each movement contains a lot of emotions. In order to dance, you don't have to know dance well. For some, it is simply one of the antidepressants.
The main character of the film is Merab, a boy who grew up in a family of dancers and he is also obliged to dance now. No one asks him how he is, what his day was like, whether he is happy or not. No one is interested in what he feels. He is alone and trying to survive. Merab is suffocated by his daily routine. He wakes up, gets dressed, goes to rehearsal, works, and then the next day, the same thing again. His life is like a closed circle and he clearly doesn't know where to go. His brother tries to live differently. He's with his friends, but he doesn't feel good either. There's no way out. The brothers don't talk about their feelings with each other either. They act as if they don't live in the same house. The only news for Merab is Irakli. A boy who dances better than him and has a better chance of getting into the ensemble. But who is Irakli in real? The well-mannered boy who tries to rebel with his earrings at the beginning of the film, but he looks like an ordinary crowd at the end and becomes part of the gray society he was fighting against. When Merab thought he was no longer alone and had someone by his side, he broke free but that's exactly where he was wrong. Irakli's psyche was weak and he couldn't withstand the blows. He mixed with the crowd again and left the boy alone. But now he was in a worse state, more devastated than he was before he met Irakli. What would have happened if he had never entered Irakli's rehearsal hall and had stayed in Batumi? Merab must have thought about this many times.
Avrora, the gossipy neighbor of the common yard, is one of the main characters in the film. She is the image of the representatives of society that has no life of their own and try to spend their days talking about others. Avrora spends all her days on the balcony and knows exactly who and when comes home. She herself has an uninteresting life. She probably lives alone. No one is interested in her, but she knows every little detail of everyone's life. Everyone has one of these Avroras in their neighborhood.
Merab's parents are possible reflections of his future life. This is a hint of what can happen to a dancer years later, when he is no longer in shape and no one will invite him to concerts. A dark and lightless life awaits him. His parents devoted their entire youth to dancing, and in the end, one became a worker at the market, and the other stayed at home penniless.
The boy wanted a different life. He tries to dance ballet at home, in a closed room and this makes him happy. His inner self is waiting for a different version of life. It is interesting what would have happened if he had fully expressed himself and taken risks? Would he not have been afraid of people's reactions, who he would have been or what era he would have lived in? His situation is much more interesting. He can hold more thoughts than what is shown on the screen. The depths of his personality are lost in the film.
What does each of them feel, when do they hurt? When are they happy? Are they happy with the reality they live in? And if they are not, why don't they change it? There is only one answer to these questions - fear. Initially, this feeling is not visible, it is hidden, gradually entering their consciousness and covering their entire mind. Everything is presented superficially in the film, and the director does not express the emotional state of each character.
Merab's personality is slowly falling apart. Every time he tries to get up, falls to the ground. Suddenly, he has lost everything at once. Friends, work, Irakli. The world collapsed on him, and when he was about to jump off the cliff, his brother's embrace saved him. His brother appeared next to him at the right time. He was the only one who protected him. Although he didn't understand him, he still supported him. In the end, Merab danced for everyone. He is not the only one standing in the rehearsal hall. His life is felt in his movements: Irakli's protest, his brother's rudeness, and everything that happened to him. He accumulated all the pain and dedicated each dance movement to it. He is no longer the weak character who appeared at the beginning of the film. Now he expresses his protest himself, and thus says what everyone else is saying in one voice.
It is interesting to see what Merab is like through Levan Akin and the audience’s eyes, and do their visions resemble each other? Did the audience understand the director's message? What did the director want to say with this film? Viewers from different countries will perceive it differently. Some will recognize themselves in the character and cry a lot, others will hate and exclude them. Some will have a neutral attitude towards the characters. And all this is the fault of the country, traditions, lifestyle and society.
Barbare Kalaijishvili
