FILM: BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY DIRECTED BY: ELENE NAVERIANI STARRING: EKA CHAVLEISHVILI, TEMIKO CHICHINADZE Rating: 3 out of 4 stars
By Dan Pal
While so many love stories are focused on the passion of youth, it is rare these days to find one featuring a middle-aged couple. Thinking back, it’s been almost 30 years since Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep created one of the most romantic films for people over forty with The Bridges of Madison County. The performances, direction, and jazzy score made for a tear-inducing story about a sudden love blossoming at an advanced age. The new film Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry arrives with a slightly different take on the subject.
Directed and co-written by filmmaker Elene Naveriani from the country of Georgia, a unique character named Etero is created and played by Eka Chavleishvili. The 48-year-old woman owns a very small, almost empty store in a rural town. The relationship she has with customers is not exactly warm and cuddly. Quite the contrary. Etero walks around with a stern look, almost affectless. Even her friendships with other women feel strained. Etero seeks out her few joys by picking blackberries by a local river. During one of those walks she slips and falls several feet towards the river. Shaken and bruised, Etero imagines the strange reactions she’d receive if she had in fact died.
The experience has an unexpected effect on her one day when the distributor of her store’s products arrives. Suddenly she becomes immensely attracted to the similarly aged man, Murman. They have sex in the store and develop a very strong attachment even though he is married. There’s no jazz or any other romantic music playing to underscore what is happening. Rather the whole situation is so new to Etero that she herself has probably never dreamed anything like this could happen to her. At 48, she’s no longer a virgin.
Naveriani spares nothing when it comes to revealing the couple’s far from traditionally beautiful bodies. They are average-looking, with Etero a bit on the large side. It’s clear that the director wanted to make sure viewers see that such people can have the same pent up desires as everyone else. Much credit has to be given to the actors for being so brave during these rather explicit sex scenes.
Generally, the pacing of the film is very slow though. The energy reflects the mostly stoic looking Etero and probably also the pace of the town. One interesting visual element here is the use of color. Specifically, there is a lot of green and blue surrounding Etero that gets infused with bright reds to reflect the new passion that has entered her life. It also breathes life into an otherwise static setting.
Eka Chavleishvili is interesting as Etero. Because the character is so affectless and her eyes remain widely open for much of the film, when she does smile her face lights up in a significant way suggesting sides of the character she likely rarely reveals.
The film doesn’t have most of the bells and whistles we’d associate with a romantic comedy or drama (this one falls somewhere between them.) But perhaps it does have a more realistic tone reflective of two middle-aged characters discovering something they might have thought was gone from their lives.
Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry played at the Chicago International Film Festival last Fall. It is now streaming on Mubi.