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13 Tzameti

2005, Movie, NR, 86 mins

13 Tzameti: Review

13 TZAMETI
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Writer-director Gela Babluani's debut is a spare, ice-cold thriller that combines the nastiest ideas from THE DEER HUNTER (1978), INTACTO (2001) and HOSTEL (2006) to produce an icy plunge into the dark depths of the human mind. Shot in neorealist black-and-white, it opens like a gritty slice of social drama, then takes a sharp turn into bleak, existential horror. Sebastien (George Babluani, the filmmaker's brother), an impoverished, 22-year-old immigrant living in a small French town with his parents and brother, supports his family by repairing roofs. He doesn't realize — or can't admit to himself — how desperate and trapped he feels, until temptation, in the guise of opportunity, knocks. Sebastian overhears a tantalizing conversation while working on a rundown seaside cottage occupied by middle-aged junkie Jean-Francois Godon (Philippe Passon) and his flinty-eyed wife (Olga Legrand). Godon, broke and increasingly desperate, is waiting for a letter; whatever's inside represents financial opportunity, but Godon is afraid — he's not sure he'll "survive it" this time. The letter arrives the day Godon dies of an overdose and Sebastien pockets it, unaware that he's not the only one who knows it was delivered. With the police discretely dogging his heels, Sebastien assumes Godon's identity and follows a series of circuitous directions with no idea where they'll eventually lead, winding up, like an unwary child in a fairy tale, in a forbidding house in the middle of a deep, dark wood. But instead of witches or goblins, he becomes the plaything of gangsters and gamblers, who live for a murderous, high-stakes variation on Russian roulette that begins with a roomful of players and winnows them down, round by round, to one. The last man standing walks away with a handsome pile of cash and a searing scar on his soul. Though the story is spare, its sense of wrenching displacement and the casual cruelty of the world is clearly rooted in the 26-year-old filmmaker's history: The son of a noted Georgian filmmaker, Babluani grew up in post-perestroika Tbilisi amid civil war and random violence. In the early '90s his father, pessimistic about the future of the Georgian republic, announced his retirement from filmmaking and sent his children to the safety of Paris. There the younger Baluani cobbled together the resources to follow in the family footsteps with this modern-day fable, which unfolds in a noir landscape of inky shadows, white-hot light and hollow-eyed stares. (In French and Georgian, with subtitles.) leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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