Beginning
Directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili
Running time: 2hrs10 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Ia Sukhitashvili stars in Beginning
A couple of weeks ago, I found a handwritten envelope, sodden and shredded at the edges, on my front doormat, and opened it to find a two-page conversion pitch from the local order of Jehovah's Witnesses, scrawled in neat, squat letters the approximate size of sesame seeds. I respected this painstaking, pandemic-induced alternative to door-to-door methods enough to keep it on my desk a few days before binning it, during which time I wondered who wrote it and countless ones just like it, and how much choice they had in the matter. And shortly afterwards, coincidentally enough, I rewatched Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili's staggering debut Beginning, about a Jehovah minister's wife peering out restlessly at a world beyond the Kingdom Hall, and thought again about the lives that continue stoically after we've said “no, thank you” and slammed the front door.
Beginning starts with a literal bang: a Molotov cocktail is thrown into the rural church that Yana (a brilliant Ia Sukhitashvili) keeps in order for her husband David, and the ensuing panic gives way to the kind of eerie calm in which more silently dangerous things can happen. Left alone when David visits church elders to manage the fallout, she's given the space to listen to her most subversive, escape-minded thoughts, but again, the evil of men intrudes violently from outside: sexual assault and more covert psychological abuse jointly prompt an unnerving rebellion.
Kulumbegashvili tracks it all in long, unbroken, exquisitely lit takes that give us ample time to think with Yana, even if we're never given direct access to her ruptured psyche. Our extended considerations of organised religion, patriarchal society and how to be alone whistle through all the film's beautiful empty space, colouring and complicating it. I'll think about it the next time I get a letter or a house call from a hopeful-looking Jehovah's Witness with passions and anxieties beyond their neatly scripted sermon, even if I'll shut the door just the same.
BEGINNING (2020) Written by Dea Kulumbegashvili and Rati Oneli | Shot by Arseni Khachaturan | Edited by Matthieu Taponier