In Bloom
Both Eka and Natia are 14 years old, and the title of In Bloom reflects this, as well as Georgia the country where the film is set a year after it gained independence. This dual significance becomes evident quite early on; what takes longer to realise is how bitterly ironic that title is.
In 1992, when the movie takes place, Georgia had already begun its descent into several years of civil war after achieving nationhood once more. The conflict was centred in Abhkazia and South Ossetia, two regions home to Russian-backed separatist movements.
Within these politics Ekvtimishvili and Gross zoom in closely on their pair of teenage leads. Eka (Lika Babluani) and Natia (Mariam Bokeria) deal with problems that are less desperate but no less universal than schoolyard gossip: an alcoholic father with a short fuse for Natia; her crush on handsome Lado (Data Zakareishvili).
So it’s not until later that we get more than glimpses of Georgia’s post-independence chaos. Poverty lines for bread are chaotic; fathers are absent at war; Eka’s dad is doing time for violent crime. It’s there in radio broadcasts announcing bombings or curfews or declaring “every Georgian in the country should be armed.”
For Natia, unrest also takes the shape of a romantic gesture from Lado: He pulls her aside one day, tells her to close her eyes and hands her a gun. And through that gift we understand that Georgia won’t let them go unscathed either.
What’s most powerful about this scene might be how destined Chekhovian rules feel upon the weapon’s introduction. It doesn’t matter if it goes off or not; its being there is enough.
Of course, the gun isn’t all bad news. Natia accepts it with little concern, enjoying the power that comes with owning it; Eka uses it to scare off a boy who won’t leave her alone. But if the gun protects from one kind of violent Georgian reality, it also implies acceptance of another.
That trade haunts In Bloom, and no one seems to feel it more than Eka. In the film’s most stirring scene, she spontaneously performs a traditional dance at Natia’s forced wedding to a man she does not love. It is both compromise an acknowledgement that if she can’t stop this marriage, she should celebrate with her friend and strength. It is proof that submission doesn’t mean surrendering pride or resolve, as many of the women in these stories show us.
The way social tension in Georgia simmers beneath the story here and gradually infects its characters’ emotional lives recalls A Separation, where Asghar Farhadi showed how people could be undone by their own helplessness over time. More directly, In Bloom echoes 2012 documentary The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear by Tinatin Gurchiani bleak snapshots from young Georgians’ lives.
I thought Gurchiani’s movie was not good but it kept coming back to my mind while I was watching In Bloom. This is because the two films depict different eras with shared problems; most of what bothers Eka, Natia and their friends also plagues the real-life youngsters featured in The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear such as having no parents or siblings who are locked up somewhere plus living through Abkhazian war which left them devastated.
To me, these are not just complementary pictures but actually inseparable ones they seem like postcards from a nation scarred by history that has never fully healed itself so as to blossom into its full potential.
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