For ten whole minutes, Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili holds her gaze — and her camera — still. In the frame, the back of a nurse, and a naked woman’s body stretched atop an improvised operating bed made out of a worn-out dinner table. There are three women in this scene, the third being obstetrician Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), whose skilled hands work at retrieving the embryo growing inside the young girl. We hear metal tools clink, their sharp sound made ever sharper against the softness of leaking fluids and skin brushing against skin. We hear words, too, cutting through primal grunts, sparse and objective. The girl needs to keep still. Almost there.
In his seminal poem The Waste Land, T.S. Elliot famously calls April “the cruellest month,” but springtime has rarely looked as bleak as it does in Kulumbegashvili’s elusive, eerie sophomore outing. On the surface, this is the story of Nina, whose mishandling of a patient’s labour resulted in the stillbirth of a baby boy. She now faces scrutiny not only from the hospital she works at but also from the grieving father who threatens to expose her illicit activities.
It is an open secret that Nina sneaks patients the contraception pill and performs illicit abortions in the small villages nearby. Although a secular country with laws that allow abortion up to 12 weeks, Georgia has a majorly Orthodox Christian population, which means that the laws on paper are not always the ones of the land. Many of the women who come into Nina’s care are girls made mothers far too young, ushered into a life of forced procreation they know they won’t be able to escape from.
When confronted with the danger of her underground practice, Nina is quick to insist that, were she not to do what she does, someone else would. But much of April is about the opposite truth — it is the danger, much more than any burning sense of duty or morality, that seems to feed the restless creature trapped within Nina. Kulumbegashvili weaves in disturbing images of an emaciated crone throughout the film, seesawing between the placidity of open fields and the darkness of the angled corners of the doctor’s house, where this alien being often lurks. Is this how Nina sees herself, drained of life after years of death? Has seeing the horrors of others’s bodies blurred her perception of her own?
The answers to this riddle are as slippery as Nina herself, a woman of contained poise but also staggering self-hatred. She picks up strangers by the road on her long drives into the bowels of Georgia, all too aware that the further she is from the sanitised walls of the hospital, the further she is from the perceived safety of civilised society. She matter-of-factly offers to blow a guy off, and is just as casual in her request for reciprocation, soon finding out that very little separates the elation of pleasure from that of violence. Her relationships are just as strange—she speaks of no family or friends, and the only connection in her life is David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), a doctor at her clinic with whom she was once involved. It is as if Nina walks the world gnawing at a figurative umbilical cord, intent on detaching herself from those around her.
Despite striking, haunting imagery — including two graphic, prolonged childbirth scenes — April is, at its core, a film about what we don’t see. Lars Ginzel’s rich, precise sound design immerses one into this fable-like landscape, where all there is to hold on to is sonance. It is a disorienting, all-consuming sensorial experience and made all the much better to those willing to surrender to its mysteries.
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