J Paul Johnson
The Antique, the second feature from Georgian writer-director Russudan Glurijdze debuting this week on the North American streaming service Film Movement Plus, is a sly, slow, and stately representation of the challenges her countrypeople have faced in recent decades. Handsomely shot and impeccably acted, Glurijdze’s drama of immigration and diaspora tracks one woman’s movements at a moment when the aggression and brutality of Russia’s regime lurks around every corner. One of the last few foreign-funded films to have been shot in Russia, it shares with Glurjidze’s first film, 2016’s House Of Others, the distinction of being selected as Georgia’s official Academy Awards submission. Its title functions both to characterize the work of one character and the age of another; it also might just parallel the film’s deliberate rumination on the past.
The film’s narrative revolves, if loosely, around a single Georgian woman, Medea (Salome Demuria), recently emigrated to St. Petersburg, where she has found illicit work selling faux and smuggled antiques. The shop is run by an unseen dictatorial woman whose voice is heard only through her dystopian, if slightly dysfunctional, surveillance system—a pithy and occasionally comic comment on Russia’s notorious history as a surveillance state. Medea, who recently sold her house in Georgia, finds a deal on a large apartment in St. Petersburg’s historic center. But it comes with a catch in the form of its aging resident-owner, the eccentric and dementia-suffering Vadim Vadimich (Sergey Dreyden), who is apparently a permanent, unremovable fixture with whom she’ll have to share quarters.
While one main narrative thread consists of the apparently benign friendship that evolves between Medea and Vadim, another involves one of her fellow antique traffickers and Georgian émigrés, Lado (Vladimir Daushvili), who is both smitten with and suspicious of Medea and her movements. When he tracks her to her new apartment, he’s not sure what to make of her curious-but-comfortable living arrangements. Complicating matters even further is Vadim’s son Peter (Vladimir Vdovichenk), who is similarly suspicious of his father’s new tenant even while he too finds himself incapable of denying his attraction to her.
At times, the carefully drawn situation seems little more than a site for gentle farce. Vadim and Medea enjoy a quiet date of sorts; the doltish and uncultured Lado stupidly breaks Vadim’s turntable arm, then even more stupidly tries to cover it up; Peter’s suspicions regarding Medea’s intentions are brought low by his difficult-to-conceal interests. Yet, The Antique is only darkly comic. The wintry setting of St. Petersburg is shot in a claustrophobic, narrow aspect ratio, its omnipresent snow casting a frosty blanket over the exteriors; inside, natural light gamely filters through the dust and decay of Vadim’s centuries-old apartment, never fully illuminating its interiors. It looks like it might have been shot a half-century ago, or more.
Only implicitly does The Antique work to expose the crimes of Vladimir Putin’s regime in illegally deporting Georgians in 2006. Medea and Lado must cloak their movements, lest they be swept up in the same cruel campaign that led to thousands of Georgians’ deportation. Native-born Russians Vadim and Peter, however, can enjoy their freedom of movement without sanction. In the film’s disquieting final act, background becomes foreground and the campaign to deport Georgians proves a more immediate threat. Glurijdze is more interested in the small human interactions of those caught up in, and swept away by, campaign’s like Putin’s, than she is in the broad sweep of the human rights violations themselves, but The Antique is no less immediate nor impactful for her doing so.
At times, The Antique‘s slow-moving narrative may feel enigmatic, as if its characters are slowly lurching towards an unseen, unknown goal. But for so many subjects of diaspora, they—Medea, especially, and to a lesser extent Lado—are simply doing what they can to survive, or at best, modestly improve upon their conditions of living. In that respect, The Antique reads at least a little like a parable, one of what happens when people migrate from one place to the next only to get caught up in a country’s violent anti-immigrant campaign.
To that end, The Antique‘s characters—warmly human, richly eccentric, and deeply flawed—serve as an important reminder, not just to Georgians but to all across the world, and perhaps especially those of us in the United States, of the folly of deportation campaigns like Putin’s. Our own, here in the U.S., conducted violently and lawlessly, look way too similar. But those they are carried out against are, like The Antique‘s Lado and Medea, expressly and uniquely human, striving simply to exist.
