From NYFF: ‘Beginning’ Undermines Powerful Concepts with Glacial Pacing

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s feature length directorial debut “Beginning” is a film about entrapment. With minimal dialogue and gorgeous cinematography, Kulumbegashvili portrays the suffocating role women are expected to play in a rigid patriarchal society — a society which only values them as providers for their husbands and children. While “Beginning” hardly treads new thematic ground, it is remarkable in how it conveys them; by leaving the camera as a stubbornly static participant, "Beginning" matches the entrapment of its central character with the entrapment of what viewers see on screen.

“Beginning” unfolds in a rural Georgian (the European one) town, where the central character Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness missionary, David (Rati Oneli). After religious extremists attack one of their sermons, the police refuse to intervene. Instead, the detective on the case (Kakha Kintsurashvili) begins exploiting Yana in disturbing ways. An already discontented Yana is soon forced to confront the inner struggles in her life, but just like her status in society, she stagnates.

The opening scene is incendiary. The camera sits at the back of a church as David and Yana welcome a community of believers. Five minutes into David’s presentation, Orthodox Christian extremists throw two Molotov cocktails into the building. This whole scene unravels in one unbroken take with a static camera, which compounds a feeling of shock and panic as people clamor desperately to escape. It demonstrates incredible restraint on Kulumbegashvili’s part to leave the camera stationary, and the decision pays off with striking effect: Viewers feel immobile and helpless amid the chaos.

Kulumbegashvili uses a static camera and long takes to emphasize a limited point of view. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan films with a squarish 4:3 Academy ratio — an outlier in today’s cinema, where the norm is a 16:9 widescreen. The narrow aspect ratio leaves less space to convey information on screen, making the whole film feel claustrophobic. But it’s also a trait that Khachaturan takes full advantage of with keen framing choices. In fact, he rarely pans or tilts the camera, forcing the audience to pay attention to the limited space available. In “Beginning,” what goes on outside the frame is just as important as what occurs inside it. Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, a character walks off the frame and we hear echoes of the conversation continuing off-screen. But the camera remains stationary — focused on an empty hallway instead of following the character offscreen — and it can linger there for minutes at a time.

But while there is no doubt that these stylistic choices work harmoniously on a conceptual level, they don’t necessarily translate in practice. Kulumbegashvili’s stylistic choices make viewers feel as though they are never a full participant, but rather than sparking intrigue, the lack of a full point of view ends up feeling frustrating.

This compositional tension is evidently the feeling that Kulumbegashvili wanted to recreate for audiences — for them to identify with Yana’s hopeless entrapment in a life where she is so lost that she can no longer voice what she wants. But in a film with minimal dialogue and quiet delivery, “Beginning” is also an extremely difficult watch. Instead of Khachaturan’s stunning cinematography feeling noteworthy in the moment, the unforgivingly long takes — at one point focused on Yana sleeping on a chair for minutes on end — feel like the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. As a result, when harrowing events occur, the audience feels surprisingly uninvolved instead of shocked and disturbed.

“Beginning” will certainly find its crowd in select film circles, but it feels like the type of film that will be most remembered as a mandatory screening in an entry-level film class a few years down the line — and that’s something viewers can either love or hate. Kulumbegashvili’s film screened virtually at this year’s New York Film Festival, and also at the Toronto International Film Festival.

—Staff writer Lanz Aaron G. Tan can be reached at lanzaaron.tan@thecrimson.com and on twitter @LanzAaronGTan1.