April review – Dea Kulumbegashvili comes into her own with haunting abortion drama

Dea Kulumbegashvili is the much-admired Georgian director whose feature debut, Beginning, won golden opinions, though I confess to having been agnostic on the grounds of mannerisms that were a little derivative – some resemblances there to Carlos Reygadas and Michael Haneke.

Her follow-up movie, April, is now presented at Venice. That month has never seemed crueller. The high arthouse influences are still detectable, but Kulumbegashvili has mastered and absorbed them and has an evolving film-language of her own, though still involving extended static takes, long shots in which people have inaudible but important conversations in the far distance, and explicit moments of violence whose shock is tempered and complicated by strangely exalted, if bizarre, visionary sequences.

Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is an obstetrics doctor in deep trouble for having apparently mishandled a delivery that resulted in the baby’s death. She is well known for supplying under-the-counter contraceptive pills and carrying out unofficial, illegal abortions in outlying villages, and the grieving father – furiously and disapprovingly aware of her reputation – is now demanding an inquiry into her alleged malpractice, suspecting that Nina had secretly made a high-handed decision that his poverty stricken family would better off without another mouth to feed.

Nina’s colleague and ex-partner (Kakha Kintsurashvili) is tasked with carrying out the investigation by the senior consultant, played by veteran Georgian actor Merab Ninidze.

But this is not the least of it. Nina is deeply troubled by sexual dysfunction; she drives around into the outlying rural areas picking up men with whom she has compulsively violent encounters, a little like the piano teacher of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel and Haneke’s film adaptation. Her own repressed history of sexual and romantic pain and possible pregnancy is clearly being gestured at.

Most startlingly of all, conventional dramatic scenes will be interspersed with strange silent sequences in which open landscapes and gloomy interiors appear to be haunted by a contorted wraith or monster. Is this a tormented ghost, an unquiet conscience? Surely not an adult foetus?

This is not the usual “abortion” issue movie in which the reactionary anti-abortion authorities are straightforwardly criticised and the pregnant woman is awarded compassionate centre stage status – as in Audrey Diwan’s Happening. Nor does it precisely show the abortionist as oppressive or troubled, as in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake. It is far more detached and affectless. However justified Nina is in providing terminations to terrified and victimised young women, her need to do so is not really a principled mission, but clearly a symptomatic part of some larger buried trauma.

Yet the power of April is that it shows how very illusory the idea of modernity is. Nina is part of an up-to-date hospital that prides itself on modern medical techniques all-but-guaranteeing safe, hygienic childbirth, and the failure in this regard is a very serious matter that will be investigated using comparably up-to-date rigorous methods: open, transparent, accountable. But in these wide open spaces, the same old male attitudes and prejudices hold sway – effectively unchanged over centuries. Women’s bodies are at the mercy of men and Nina’s resistance to this is also an agonised and self-tormenting kind of submission. It is a deeply unsettling meditation on sexuality and transgression.