Since Otar Left
by Chris Dashiell

To appreciate the rarity of women-centered drama in cinema, it is enough to encounter a film like Since Otar Left... , directing our gaze to women's lives with an ease and confidence that asks only for our quiet attention, and no fanfare. First-time director Julie Bertuccelli presents a family portrait--grandmother, mother, and daughter--that is true to the fragility, tensions, and hard-won wisdom of life.

In Tbilisi , the capital of Georgia in the former Soviet Union, the bright and headstrong young Ada (Dinara Drukarova) brings a letter home from the post office to her grandmother Eka (Esther Gorintin), a matriarch whose body is stooped with age but retains her spirited pride. It is from Otar, Eka's son, a doctor living in Paris , getting by at the moment by working in construction. It is obvious that the old woman dotes on her son, hanging on every letter and phone call she receives. Later, when Otar telephones his mother, the attitude of his sister (and Ada 's mother) Marina (Nino Khomasuridze), is contemptuous. Undercurrents of sibling rivalry affect Marina 's relationship with Eka. Moody and short-tempered, and making a meager living working at a kind of swap meet with her junk dealer boyfriend, Marina is both protective and resentful of her mother, while Ada is more relaxed and tolerant.

The three women are cosmopolitans, fluent French speakers who look to the brilliance of Paris for their hopes and dreams of the future. Against the uneasy background of Georgia 's crumbling social fabric, with constant power and water outages, and the old lady's laughable nostalgia for the good old days of Stalinism, a crisis occurs. While Eka is at her summer cottage, Marina gets a phone call telling her that Otar has been killed in an accident. Ada urges that they tell the old lady the truth, but Marina thinks it might kill her. Their fateful, foolish decision: to hide the facts from Eka, covering up Otar's death with phony letters forged by the granddaughter's skillful hand. This complicates everything, of course, and for the viewer it throws into relief the strange and contradictory life of the women whose world is defined by the absence of a man.

Bertuccelli's feeling for the rhythms of daily life is disarming. The story seems to develop naturally from the details of the character's mundane existence, and not from an externally imposed idea. All the minor characters are fully drawn, inhabiting a world of their own that we can glimpse on the edges of the drama, and the three main players are wonderful. Khomasuridze and Drukarova interact with a mixture of warmth and wariness that is true to the lived experience of a young woman and her mother, and all the nuances of the relationship revealed with no need of histrionics. Best is Gorintin as the grandmother, with her lively, inquisitive eyes and quiet stubbornness.

Since Otar left... is a film where the stories of women are central, shot with a sense of careful detail and regard for city life and domestic routines. A theme emerges--our journeys start with family, and continue only by finding a way to break free from family while retaining some connection. Bertuccelli manages to make this theme seem the most interesting and important one possible. This is a refreshing and moving debut by a director from whom I earnestly hope to see more.

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If the subject of a documentary is interesting enough, we needn't ask for very much from a filmmaker beyond simplicity and directness. Ballets Russes is a documentary about the exciting Russian ballet companies that dominated the form in Europe and America during the first part of the 20th century. The directors, Daniel Geller and Dana Goldfyne, are content with presenting old movie clips from performances by the companies, still photos of important figures, and present-day interviews with surviving dancers, all accompanied by a narration that explains the many ins and outs of the groups' complex histories. With material like this, anything more might simply spoil the effect. The result, I'm delighted to say, is both fascinating and enchanting.

After the death of the great ballet director Serge Diaghilev in 1929, it seemd as if the art form itself was threatened with extinction. The day was saved by a cantankerous Russian emigre named Wassily de Basil, who formed the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and hired the world's most exciting choreographers, including George Balanchine and Léonide Massine. Later, Massine broke with Basil to form another Ballet Russe, which took the Monte Carlo name while Basil renamed his The Original Ballet Russe. Their rivalry reached a crescendo in England, where they played in London simultaneously, and on wildly successful American and world tours.

Both companies took on great classic and modernist works, with Massine especially overflowing with bold new ideas, creating scores of new ballets in a few brief years. The dancers, many of them mere children when they started, were to become world-famous: Alicia Markova, Tania Riabouchinskaya, George Zoritch, Irina Baranova, Frederick Franklin, and many others. Amazingly, most of the great stars were still alive for a recent reunion, mined by the filmmakers for interviews. The reminiscences of the dancers beautifully convey the magic (and the suffering) of living and working through those times, from the 1930s through the 50s, when the ballet flourished. What really makes the film special, however, are the numerous clips from actual ballets of the period. You don't need to know much about ballet to be entranced by these fragments of marvelous dance performances. I'm not sure whether it's the directors' careful interweaving of these segments within the narrative, or simply the power of the images themselves, but they create an intense, almost magical feeling. The intelligent narration, spoken by Marian Seldes, conveys an irresistible glamour and mystique, even communicating a bit of the erotic charge that the ballet would give audiences when it was at its creative peak.