Jason J Hedrick
What I didn’t know about Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf when I began watching was that the film was shot entirely on Koberidze’s late-2000’s Sony Ericsson phone. Of course, major filmmakers like Sean Baker and Stephen Soderbergh have shot entire films on phone technology, but by comparison, those films tend toward elevating common technology into something that looks like high-end production. Dry Leaf, now playing at the Chicago International Film Festival in their “Snapshots” program, is far from interested in anything that looks like high-end production, since the Sony Ericsson technology it was shot on renders the world in a pixelated, somewhat broken texture typically associate with dated, unusable digital information (or, possibly, a bunk screener link). For Koberidze, the format has liberated the way he sees the world. In fact, he’s so confident in the format that his new film runs a half-hour longer than his last feature—shot in high-definition formats—the extraordinary, 2 and ½ hour Georgian city symphony What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? And once I realized what Koberidze was doing with his intentionally lo-res format in Dry Leaf, I immediately wanted to watch again, from the beginning, with new eyes.
The story of the film is a thin thread upon which to hang Koberidze’s visual experimentation—a father searches the Georgian countryside for his missing daughter, Lisa. His journey takes him on a road trip tied together by mostly abandoned soccer fields, one of Lisa’s recent subjects of inquiry. The father is played by the director’s actual father David Koberidze (Irilki), accompanied on his quest by a friend named Levani, who is invisible. As in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Koberidze’s “magical realist” elements are slight, almost cinematic jokes. Levani, for instance, is a character you tend to forget about in the meandering course of the film, until you hear him in voiceover commenting on the progress of their search while the camera settles on the reverse-shot of an empty car seat.
As I mentioned, Dry Leaf is being shown as part of the “Snaphots” section of the festival, which feels simultaneously fitting and confining to the film’s ambitions. I’m not sure audiences will see a riskier move at the CIFF this year than the one taken by Koberidze, as he travels the Georgian countryside, phone in hand, as freely following his impulses to capture the world in an oddly receptive and fragmented format as one can be. It’s the sort of risk that might initially turn some off, and understandably so. For those uninterested in experimental approaches, they may just find it unwatchable. As a movie for cinephiles—which Dry Leaf most definitely is—the film challenges an era of movie and image culture that consistently equates quality and marketability with high resolution. In the physical media and home theater consumer realms, high resolution has largely become a form of fetish. Koberidze has made an aesthetic move that disregards every assumption that industry and its consumers make. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, it’s a risk of technique that might come off as affected or mannered, but Koberidze’s attention to naturalism and his patient, searching attention to the format is nothing short of transcendent.
And the textured visual experimentation of Dry Leaf is only half of the equation. The score by Alexandre’s brother Giorgi Koberidze is a marvel in its own right, creating this playful, resonant conversation with the film that feels as foregrounded as the images. In fact, Dry Leaf feels as much like a piece of music as a film. The score began as pieces Giorgi was working on for an album, and in the process of making Dry Leaf, Alexandre introduced his brother to a book called Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez, and asked him to work tonally from that text toward the final music for the film. The whole affair feels like the product of a deep, familial understanding of art and literature and aesthetic approaches unique to the Koberidze’s.
Aside from What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, which gained Koberidze some notoriety, his only other feature film was also shot on the Sony Ericsson used for Dry Leaf, the 3-hour and 20-minute Let the Summer Never Come Again. For a director with a brief filmography, these films have a singular, seemingly fully established sensibility, unmistakably the work of the Koberidzes, but also radiant in their evocations. The love affair with digital texture and the personal nature of the film draws on an experimental lineage that connects disparate avant-garde works from the PixelVision diary films of Sadie Benning to David Lynch’s fascination with the look of consumer-grade Sony cameras used on Inland Empire (all while looking nothing like either of those filmmakers). Various sequences carry echoes of early structuralist films, with one sequence of travelling shots along a fence line, I suspect, an homage to Bruce Ballie’s Ella Fitzgerald-scored short All My Life. Structural elements within classic films are evoked as well, with a track-and-field sequence that feels mostly focused on the contrast of curvatures and straight lines, as in the opening stadium sequence of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And if What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is a Dziga Vertov-like orchestration of a city, then Dry Leaf is a Dziga Vertov-like symphony of an entire country.
The language Koberidze is developing, like Vertov, is moving cinema toward poetic orchestration, which feels like a welcome call to personal, independent films these days–in America, perhaps best realized this year by Carson Lund’s Eephus, which shares with Koberidze a naturalist approach applied to sports. This poetic approach abandons deadly cinematic and narrative structures, relying heavily on painterly and textural qualities that often mimic the brittle foliage of the title. The constructed and shifting quality of the film can take precedence over the search for Lisa at any time, and does for most of the film. As a film distinctly of the Caucasus region, it sometimes feels like a dream that a Ceylan or Kiarostami film is having of itself.
And yet, amidst all these ecstatic evocations, Dry Leaf never feels like it’s trying to copy or reference anything, emerging as one of the most confidently and fully realized films one is likely to see at the CIFF. There are too many joyful and captivating sequences to even get to here: the cat montage in the perfectly edited opening sequence; the movement of the natural world and kids playing football melding into one; the brief, meditative moments of total zoom-in abstraction; images of fruit bowls or grazing cows or clouded skylines like impressionist masterworks spontaneously bursting into existence after an unstable translation of light; or the mere movement of light itself, which is one of Koberidze’s specialties. At the end of the journey, the car Irilki and Levani have been travelling in gets a proper wash. Even in this mundane act, there’s a shot of a tree through the soapy window of the car that inexplicably emerges as a moving spectacle, fully capturing Koberidze’s idea that his chosen medium reveals more than it obscures.
