In Bloom

Synopsis: The story of two 14 year-old girls, Eka (Lika Babluani) and Natia (Mariam Bokeria) living in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in 1992.

Whether it’s the North of England, the projects of Brooklyn or the suburbs of Tbilisi, urban poverty appears to have much the same effect on people and so films that deal with such topics depict much the same things.

In Bloom, written by Nana Ekvtimishvili who co-directed with German collaborator, Simon Gross, is very much of this social realist stripe and thus we are witness to a general sense of dispiritedness that occasionally erupts into violence with the added dimension of background political troubles as a consequence of the break-up of the USSR. On the one hand this means food shortages but on the other it also means that the gift of a hand gun, something which Lado (Data Zakareishvili) gives to Natia and Natia in turn gives to Eka, serves a token of love.  

The story is largely told from Eka’s point of view. She lives with her mother and elder sister in what appears to have once have been middle class comfort. Her best friend, Natia, lives in a small flat with her working class parents who fight about his drinking, her formidable granny occasionally joining in the fray. The film follows the two girls as they negotiate the hurdles of everyday life: class-room fights, bullying, bread queues, Eka’s yearning for her absent father and for Natia, a rather Neaderthalish courtship that sees her peremptorily married to Kote (Zurab Gogaladze), a lout who initially appears somewhat of an improvement on her home life but whom she soon comes to despise, with disastrous results for her real love, Lado.      

The two girls are engaging in the lead roles, embodying the intense co-dependency of adolescent friendship with complete naturalness whilst the directors’ judgement is flawless in balancing purely observational material, such as Eka’s bewitching folk dance at Natia’s wedding, with more conventional narrative elements . the latter which are largely focussed on the leitmotif of the hand gun. 

Don’t expect much in the way of plot or action from In Bloom. Knowledge of the time and place would no doubt add to one’s appreciation of it but taken in itself as the portrait of two teenage friends growing up under difficult circumstances, it has much to offer.

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