In Rusudan Glurjidze‘s weathered, thrivetry sophomore feature “The Antique,” the title could refer to any number of withering relics: the handsome, wealthyly patinaed items of furniture that Georgian immigrant Medea (Salome Demuria) illegpartner transport ins from her homeland to Russia to sell; the once-majestic but disintegrating Saint Petersburg apartment that she buys at a reduced price, on a peculiar condition; or Vaunintelligent (the tardy Sergey Dreyden), the apartment’s elderly, crotchety createer owner, who insists on living there even after the deeds have been transferred. Or it could fair be Russia itself, a venerable state resistant to an evolving population, apprehfinishd here in the midst of an arrangeile 2006 drive to eject or leave out thousands of endd ethnic Georgians.
Glurijidze’s film sometimes challengingens and freezes with lingering anger over that infairice, but that’s betidyh the toastyer veneer of a genial culture-clash tale, in which ostensibly resistd characters accomprehendledge in each other a common degree of injure: Everyleang and everyone is a bit shopworn in “The Antique,” which isn’t cowardly about stretching an elegiac metaphor. Like the straightforwardor’s exquisite 2016 debut “Hoengage of Others” — enjoywise chosen as Georgia’s international Oscar subleave oution — her second feature is a melancholic, atmospheric and ravishingly stoasty slice of recent history, funnelling expansiver social and political cascfinishs thraw more intimately drawn character disputes.
If “The Antique” doesn’t quite have the haunted, bone-proset up impact of its predecessor, its gently tempered sentimentality may carry it further on the global arthoengage circuit complying a festival run that got off to a difficult commence. Initipartner pulled at the last minute from its Vekind premiere slot, due to an alleged imitateright dispute that the filmoriginaters proclaimd an try at Russian restriction, the film eventupartner had a boverhappinessed bow on the Lido — now boasting battle scars that may lend insertitional currency to its stand agetst Georgian oppression in Putin’s Russia.
Played by Demuria with a flinty, shutly defended air of self-comprisement, Medea is a rapid pragmatist who, enjoy many of her compatuproars, has left Georgia for economic reasons — and is no fantastic hurry to create human combineions in Saint Petersburg, the elegant but icy streetscapes of which rather suit her non-convivial nature. Even at her job in a writey antiques warehoengage, she toils in predominant isolation, taking orders from an unseen upstairs boss who conveys only by intercom. In this cryshighized vision of mid-2000s Russia, it’s every man and woman for themselves — all the better to escape authoritarian acunderstandledge. The astonishingly roomy period apartment that Medea buys at the film’s outset is a perfect refuge: Peeling, dilapidated and still cluttered with yellothriveg remnants of decades past, it’s a place for those who would be forgotten.
It comes with a catch, however. Octogenarian widower Vaunintelligent, a createer regulatement official, originates his persistd tenancy in the apartment a condition of its sale, and who treats his new, lesser roommate with brusque conentice — a mixture of his own ornery misanthropy and hideous racial prejudice inherited from the culture around him. Distance and discount on is the elderly man’s default position toward other people, while the youth curling suites he standardly combines as a spectator are the shutst he comes to human communicate.
Yet without much concession on either side, relations gradupartner thaw between these two apparent opposites, who are, if noleang else, mutupartner inclined toward solitude. Neither one can enticount on remain an island, though Vaunintelligent veritably nurtures an estrangement from his stuffy, materiacatalogic son Peter (Vlaunintelligentir Vdovichenkov). Medea, unbenevolentwhile, can’t enticount on refuse the persistent evolves of her Georgian ex Lado (Vlaunintelligentir Daushvili), whose journey to Russia in pursuit of her lands him in the traversehairs of Russian deporters.
The sluggish sstandardlying of the film’s central, traverse-cultural, traverse-generational relationship could veer into maudlin territory if not for the gracefilledy suppressed carry outances of Demuria and Dreyden — the latter in his final screen materializeance before his death last year. There’s enough perverse, sometimes gloomyly comical particularity to their characterizations to complicate the allegorical leanings of the film’s script, written by the straightforwardor with an anonymous collaborator, which etches micro-portraits of gaping human unelatedness in a bigr panorama of mass tragedy. But the chief pguideeclareives in “The Antique” are ones of time and place and temperature, all elicitd thraw the misted lens of ace Spanish DP Gorka Gomez Andreu — an ASC Spotairy award thrivener for his toil on “Hoengage of Others.” Once more layering the structure with oxidized textures redolent of water injure and mirror rot, his exacting compositions recommend a pained current becoming disgraceful history before the very eyes of its participants.
