07/07/2023 - In his debut feature, Luka Beradze takes a surreal and darkly funny story as the starting point for a moving portrait of bitterness and alienation in the Georgian countryside

It begins like a funny story. In 2012, a Georgian political candidate promised new teeth to everyone who voted for him. Hundreds of people, most of them beyond 60 and living in the countryside, got their decayed gnashers pulled out on the campaign trail, with promises to replace them later. When said candidate failed to win the election, however, there was no one to pay for the treatments anymore, and the villagers simply found themselves missing even more teeth than before. 

Georgian director Luka Beradze takes the name of this egregiously unscrupulous election campaign as the title of his film: Smiling Georgia [+see also:
interview: Luka Beradze
film profile] had its world premiere in the Special Screenings section of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and at 62 minutes, it is one of the shortest feature films playing at the festival. It is also one of the most contemplative and least didactic, as well as one of the very best. 

The first part of the film is genuinely funny, gathering testimonies from villagers about that fateful day when they were asked to go somewhere in town and get some of their teeth pulled out. Beradze’s strategy is to actually allow us to laugh at them at first, though not mockingly; rather, we are laughing out of shock and surprise. Why are they so calm about this? Perhaps their cool could be put down to the events happening some ten years ago. Still, the way they explain them as though they made any logical sense is startling. And how could they let this happen in the first place? 

Answers slowly begin to emerge when Beradze shifts gears and the film becomes a more patient observer, showing aspects of these people’s daily lives in silence and without forcing any particular point — sometimes what we see is funny, other times it is more ambiguous. A long take on a group of men all singing hilariously out of tune at a wedding party is very amusing, but also slightly disconcerting: that no one seems to notice how horrible their singing is suggests that what we are witnessing has more to do with tradition than anything else, something that is beyond our grasp and which we are hardly well placed to judge. Beradze presents these quirks without concealing how odd they can appear to an outsider, but also without judging them, until they are revealed to be part of a much wider project aimed at humanising his subjects. 

From the start, director of photography Lomero Akhvlediani and Beradze, who also edited the film alongside Nodar Nozadze and Ioseb 'Soso' Bliadze (behind A Room Of My Own [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze and Ta…
film profile], a highlight of last year’s festival), pay attention to the peculiar beauty of the environment, which seems deeply entwined with its relative emptiness. The omnipresence of nature, the somewhat dilapidated houses emerging from teeming greenery, and the animals often walking in and out of frame, suggest a very slow rhythm of life — miles away from the gaudy and loud programmes playing on one man’s television, or the shiny clothes and fake smiles of the political candidates on the posters around town. The feeling is that of an undeniable gulf between the countryside and the city, even as the latter controls the former, as was shown by the Smiling Georgia scandal. 

As entertaining and warm as the film is, then, it is also undeniably bitter, a quality that jumps out in a striking sequence where a female journalist and her camera crew visit one of the old women whose teeth were practically all pulled out. The fashionable journalist — who arrives in this tiny village wearing studded sunglasses! — wants to finally give the poor woman her new teeth as part of her TV programme, in which she helps one person every week. It’s an utterly disgusting project, as the scam victim’s furious husband points out: “I’m embarrassed of being used like a clown.” Expecting gratitude, the journalist is shocked. But the husband’s reaction is justified ten times over when, in an even more surreal development, the journalist is distraught to find that her next would-be subject “only” needs her dentures replaced: “I want to help toothless people, and you bring me to a woman with dentures.” It has to be seen to be believed.

Smiling Georgia paints a delicate portrait of a part of Georgia that is very beautiful but profoundly lonely, disillusioned yet still menaced by self-interested politicians and others who continue to hover above like vultures. 

Smiling Georgia was produced by 1991 Productions.