Blackbird, Blackbird, BlackBerry: Finding A Desperate Love in Middle Age Loneliness

MOVIE INFO:

Etero, a 48-year-old woman living in a small village in Georgia, has chosen to remain unmarried. She cherishes her freedom, as much as her cakes. Her choice to live alone is often the cause of gossip among her fellow villagers. Unexpectedly, she finds herself falling into a passion with a man and is suddenly faced with the decision of whether to pursue the traditional route of coupling or continue to pursue a life of independence. Etero must grapple with her newfound feelings and decide how to find her own path to happiness.

REVIEW:

Blackbird, Blackbird, BlackBerry starts out with a clever hidden Beatles joke. Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), a middle-aged lonely and single woman in a remote Georgian village is out walking along a steep ravine, collecting blackberries for the cakes she likes to bake, when she is truck by the beauty of a single blackbird in a bush. Yes, like the McCartney song on the Beatles White Album, Etero an avid birdlover, has been waiting for this moment to arise. The rest of the lyrics can be applied to her: a lonely woman caught in her nights of solitude and routine, figuratively ensnared in the bush and desiring to fly.

To make the title complete, she see the bird two times followed by a shot of her picking a single blackberry. She then loses her footing and falls off the ravine and out of frame. The director, Elene Navarini switches the viewpoint to a terrifying and dizzying shot straight down to show Etero’s desperate struggle from ecstatic joy to now near death experience. Blackbird, Blackbird, BlackBerry, however, gives Etero a second chance. She seizes the moment and the movie becomes a tender, realistic story about loneliness and love.

Having seen her death, and on the onset of menopause (read the demise of her fertile- and still virginal- womanly identity), Etero enters into an affair with Murman (Termiko Chichinadze) the new delivery driver for the family run store she’s been managing most of her life. The tryst is glorious, passionate, sensual and thrilling. It fills her life with gorgeous wondering instead of dullness and loneliness. Still, overarching is the dread that with menopause will come her mother’s cancer.

The movie is adapted from a novel by the Georgian writer Tamta Melashvili. Naveriani unravels the story with probably the same deadpan self-assurance that most have existed in the novel. She lets the actors hold each other and the canera’s gaze emphatically. This allows for a more realistic, naturalistic love story- one between two people that are NOT lovely, sexy and young. Still its gentle, graphically sexual and yet ebulliently sensual. It’s a gem worth seeking out.

Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry gets a 3.5/5 or a B+. It’s streaming on Mubi.