01/07/2024 - George Sikharulidze’s debut tells the story of an 18-year-old boy who experiences conflicting emotions as his sexuality awakens against the backdrop of Georgian society

Georgian director George Sikharulidze’s feature debut, Panopticon [+see also:
trailer
interview: George Sikharulidze
film profile], which has just world-premiered in Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe Competition, takes its title from Foucault’s concept of constant visibility and employs it in the most varied possible sense. The film’s conflicted hero, 18-year-old Sandro (newcomer Data Chachua), is not just a voyeur; he is a literal ogler of women and an exhibitionist who also perceives himself as constantly being watched by God and society. But what he misses most is being watched over and cared for by his parents.

Sandro’s mother is a soprano living in New York and waiting for residence papers so that she can bring him and her mother there. Meanwhile, Dad (an intense Malkhaz Abuladze) is heading to a monastery to become a monk. So, Sandro is basically left with his grandmother, an old-school opera connoisseur who mocks the shrine-like display of crosses and Orthodox icons (which she calls “characters”) on the wall.

Sandro plays in a football club, and there, he meets an older boy, Lasha (another strong newcomer, Vakhtang Kedeladze). Besides seeing a sort of older-brother figure in him, he has a thing for Lasha’s mother, hairdresser Natalia (a sensitive Ia Sukhitashvili), in whom he finds a replacement for many different relationships, not least a motherly one.

But Sandro is a very confused young man, unclear about what these feelings that are coming up at his age mean. He sees almost every girl or woman on the street or on public transport as a sexual object and actually often touches them in inappropriate ways, while he dismisses the natural, loving advances of his girlfriend Tina (Salome Gelenidze) as “perverse”. In fact, when we meet her around the half-hour mark of the film, we’re surprised to find out that he even has a girlfriend.

Sandro thinks of himself as religious, but his understanding of Biblical ethics seems to be limited to being judgemental, especially towards young women. This way, Sikharulidze shows him as easy prey for right-wing nationalists, and Lasha brings him into his group. These self-styled blackshirts want to throw out all of the immigrants from Georgia, especially Arabs, and Sandro becomes, as often happens, one of the most violent and driven of the bunch.

In another example of his meticulous work that immensely contributes to the understanding of the story, Romanian DoP Oleg Mutu films in widescreen, with an almost imperceptibly moving camera which always follows the characters’ faces. The lighting and colours are natural and are used in a classical way, with a church scene in which father and son exchange significant glances standing out also thanks to Chiara Costanza’s sparsely used but magnificent, soaring score.

Besides being inspired by Foucault, Sikhuralidze gives a direct nod to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, and a The Graduate association is inevitable in Sandro and Natalia’s relationship – except the causes for it are completely different. In Panopticon, fantasies and reality often mix, and thanks to Giorgia Villa’s superbly legible editing, the viewer knows exactly when this is intentionally ambiguous and when we are witnessing a scene that is only happening in the hero’s head. Chachua’s own contribution here is substantial: this young actor can clearly convey overlapping and conflicting emotions, and when we witness his final, cathartic and rather unexpected transformation, it’s as if we are looking at a new person painfully trying to shed his old skin.

Panopticon is a co-production between Georgia’s 20 Steps Production, Italy’s Ombre Rosse Film Production, Romania’s Tangaj Production and France’s FILMO2.