‘April’ review: A visceral Georgian abortion drama

Déa Kulumbegashvili’s April is a bone-rattling drama about what it means to be a lady within the nation of Georgia. The nation’s legal guidelines allow being pregnant termination solely as much as 12 weeks — earlier than some individuals even know they’re anticipating — and even then, rural stigma prevents a lot of them from accessing care. Kulumbegashvili locations her protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) in opposition to this risky backdrop, as an obstetrician who dangers her profession by driving to far-flung villages to assist pregnant girls in want of abortions.

Whereas the movie’s focus is the aspersions solid on Nina’s character, it tells its story in indirect methods, with beautiful confrontations of violence and bodily perform that kind a visceral material. The movie presents life as an overlapping showreel of start, demise, being pregnant, abortion, and intercourse, all aspects of feminine expertise that Kulumbegashvili merges right into a monstrous beast — not simply narratively, however actually, by way of nightmarish imagery.

All of the whereas, April unfolds with the type of unrelenting rigidity that takes it from understated drama to razor-wire thriller, a metamorphosis owed to not dashing up its photos, however slowing down and lingering on them for jaw-dropping lengths of time. It is a movie that induces revulsion, however on the identical time, is just too magnetic to divert your eyes away from.

What’s April about?

The opening sounds and pictures of April are squirm-inducing, however instantly hypnotic. A humanoid determine wanders in a darkish and empty void, bare and hunched-over — both like a fetus, or an outdated lady — as breathy whispers eat the soundscape. These regularly rework to sounds of laughter and kids enjoying, as if this mysterious being have been separated from some phantom household by solely a skinny layer of actuality. Even earlier than the film presents its topic, it calls to thoughts photos of abortion and of ageing, woven collectively in some nightmare of anxious remorse.

With out warning, stray photographs of rain and cautious noticed pure landscapes yank us right into a hospital room, as Kulumbegashvili captures a lady giving start beneath harsh fluorescents — however this stunning, bloody, painful miracle of life ends in demise. The mom and her husband launch an inquiry in opposition to Nina as to why their child died, putting the OBGYN beneath a highlight of her personal, and leaving looming doubts for the viewers as as to whether she was at fault.

Nina, middle-aged and single, makes for a straightforward goal by males seeking to query her character — particularly as she’s lengthy been the topic of rumors about unlawful abortions. Her superiors on the hospital appear prepared to look the opposite approach, however solely up to a degree. Given the investigation, who higher to throw beneath the bus than the ageing spinster who already has a black mark in opposition to her?

Nevertheless, none of this stops Nina from persevering with to to journey to rural villages on her personal time to carry out what she sees as her obligation towards uneducated girls whose lives can be ruined by single being pregnant — because of threats from native males — even when they needed to be moms within the first place. She represents a selection, or a minimum of an choice, when these girls have none, even when it places her personal decisions in danger.

April is dreamlike, however hauntingly sensible.

Simply as typically as Kulumbegashvili’s cuts to the aforementioned, formless creature, it presents prolonged scenes of Nina touring to the countryside that provide house for viewers to ruminate — and to get better. The strain the film in any other case holds might be debilitating.

Take, as an example, a prolonged abortion scene. When Nina helps a younger mute lady, Nana (Roza Kancheishvili), terminate her being pregnant, Kulumbegashvili’s digicam — courtesy of cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan — focuses not on anybody character, however the assembly of fingers and our bodies. The process itself is obscured, however the body’s focus is Nana’s torso as she lies on a plastic tablecloth. On one facet of the body, Nina works diligently to guard the younger lady’s future. On the opposite facet, the lady’s mom, Mzia (Ana Nikolava), holds and comforts her. It is a traumatic sequence because of the feelings it expresses and conjures by juxtaposing a mom’s act of affection with a daughter’s yelps of ache, by way of a process that might have its personal critical penalties, ought to or not it’s found.

The ladies in April are all caught between a rock and a tough place, and Nina’s story embodies theirs in microcosm. She turns into, within the course of, a type of cypher of womanhood, and at occasions she even imagines herself because the formless creature (particularly when she sleeps with considered one of her superiors), as if her self-perception and fears of ageing have been tied to being pregnant and intercourse. Her private relationship to being pregnant, nevertheless, is rarely clarified — whether or not she’s ever been pregnant, or had an abortion herself — as a result of she appears to wall that a part of herself off from different individuals. Maybe it is necessary for the job.

In April, there is a violence and wonder inherent to each being pregnant and abortion, simply as there may be to nature. Kulumbegashvili appears to steadily draw this comparability by way of transitions that contain thundering rain and plush, flowery landscapes. Nevertheless, violence of a distinct type lurks in each nook, too, and seems abruptly, with out warning. 

April makes the violence of males really feel gut-churning. 

In an early scene, when the daddy who accused Nina confronts her, the scene is eerily quiet, till he has an outburst and spits in Nina’s face. The sound this makes, and the affect it has within the course of, is as visceral (if no more so) than any picture of start or abortion that Kulumbegashvili presents. Though male docs and directors declare to be on Nina’s facet, the body locations them at odds together with her even in its slender, square-ish side ratio, seating them at an workplace desk alongside the aforementioned father, as if she have been a legal on trial.

The violence of males, by way of their actions, and thru the constraints they create, is virtually the glue that binds April collectively — even when the film veers towards empowering carnal pleasures. Nina, maybe to deal with the pressures ( or possibly she simply feels prefer it) cruises by way of the evening and picks up males to hook up with. Nevertheless, there is a skinny line between pleasure and ache, and never in an attractive approach. Males attempt to benefit from her, and turn out to be violent with a quickness, turning quiet moments oppressively loud, like gunshots echoing by way of the evening.

There is a equally razor-thin margin between intercourse and demise, if solely due to the implications imposed on intercourse — or relatively, on girls for having intercourse — that manifests in a number of methods. Intercourse itself results in violence. Or it results in being pregnant, which forces some girls to place their lives in danger, whether or not they have abortions or not. A lot of that is implied or referenced relatively than proven outright. However the specter of those potentialities is ever-present, bolstered by way of Kulumbegashvili’s frames, which seize the highly effective gazes of males by way of unbroken stares on the digicam and the minimized place of girls by way of their minuscule dimension in body.

April is a ghostly movie that beats with life at its most fragile, contrasted with photographs of pure landscapes in ways in which recommend (and power) a deeper reflection on the physique and spirit. It is deeply discomforting in ways in which cinema should be when making such a posh level concerning the methods girls’s experiences — or experiences outlined by gendered violence, from the womb to the tomb — are so intrinsically sure by private fears and needs, and by the fragility of non-public autonomy in a world that so simply legislates it away by way of disgrace. It is a masterful work.

April is at the moment searching for distribution.

UPDATE: Sep. 25, 2024, 4:18 p.m. EDT April was reviewed out of its World Premiere on the Venice Worldwide Movie Competition on Sept. 7, 2024. This submit has been up to date to toast its New York Movie Competition premiere.