Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 1 post ] 
Author Message
PostPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 5:49 pm 
Offline
Site Admin

Joined: Sat Mar 08, 2003 1:50 pm
Posts: 4859
Location: California/NYC
SALOMÉ ALEXI: LINE OF CREDIT (2014)

Image
NINO KASRADZE IN LINE OF CREDIT

Road to financial disaster paved with wishful thinking

Salomé Alexi's Line of Credit is a drama of financial ruin and it tells a story, one that is both classic (it has tinges of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov) and contemporary: it refers to the 2008 financial meltdown. The film is shot in bright, flat digital imagery with interiors so stark they seem like stage sets, the dry approach perhaps influenced by the new Romanian cinema, but the artificial look undercutting the deadpan realism of the Romanian style, with touches of humor. Alexi focuses on Nico (Nino Kasradze), an attractive forty-year-old woman, formerly resident in Russia, now returned to her native Tbilisi, capital of post-Soviet Georgia, who tries to deal with her and her family's financial woes in a time of financial crisis from which there is no hopeful way out. Day after day she pawns, sells, or borrows to pay bills, help relatives, pay off debus -- and then spends money on entertaining or an expensive pocketbook, as if pretending to be well off would make the erosion of her family's economic base go away. She suffers a death by a thousand cuts that ends in ruin, and the seizure of the comfortable family house and all its contents by authorities. This happened recently to 14% of the homeowners of the country, end notes tell us, following mortgages, some of which, surely, as in the US, were bad or fraudulent ones.

The trouble with Line of Credit is its repetitiousness. Alexi is telling a story. But does she know what a story is? As Vassilis Economo, writing from Venice, pointed out, Line of Credit deals with "a key issue," with a potentially disastrous "impact on Georgian society," but she does not "evolve her initial idea." That's to say, her protagonist just keeps doing variations of the same thing day after day. There's not much suspense or narrative drive. The story also is universal, but wastes its universality by adopting a foolish protagonist. Or if Alexi wanted to focus on her protagonist's tragic foolishness she should have made that aspect more dramatic. However, despite the stark style, Alexi does keep returning us to the post-Soviet Tblisi's rows of sleazy money lenders, pawn shops, and other exploiters of the round of debt, borrowing, and more debt that has characterized the life of the new poor.

Her debut feature saw the light in the 2014 Venice Festival's Orizzonti series ("The new trends in world cinema"). She studied at the prestigious Paris film school La Fémis and has made her film in the Georgian language, like the Oscar-nominated Tangerines (2013), Corn Island , Brides-- indeed Google provides a whole surprising row of colorful recent film posters of Georgian films. Whether this is a wave or a style remains to be seen. See a well-informed review by Arsaib Gilbert in Letterboxed that expresses a much more positive view of this film than mine and suggests a wave may indeed be on the way. She sees a link between Alexi's dry depiction of Nino's failing day-to-day financial strategies and the sardonic humor(and whimsy?) of French-based Georgian cinematic master Otar Iosseliani's films. She notes that many of the new Georgian directors are women, and that Alexi herself is even the third in a line of female directors beginning with her grandmother, Noutsa Gogoberidze, the first female Georgian director." So whether or not Alexi's film is a complete success, her pedigree and its topicality recommend it for festival audiences.

Line of Credit/Kreditis limiti, 85 mins., the first feature of Salomé Alexi, debuted at Venice in its Horizons series. Screened for this review as part of the FSLC-MoMA 2015 New Directors/New Films series.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Forum locked This topic is locked, you cannot edit posts or make further replies.  [ 1 post ] 

All times are UTC - 8 hours


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 195 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
cron
Powered by phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Group