This game of cat and mouse – sophisticated, unpredictable and elusive, verging on a split personality – was characteristic not only of Stalin, but also of other tyrants, masters in the art of manipulation and domination. Duplicity, lies and dissimulation: the predatory feline’s characteristic tactic of seducing and terrorising, hypnotising, thwarting and exploiting its victim, whilst never letting it slip from its clutches. After suggesting that the church’s case has been resolved favourably, Aravidze enquires, with cunning courtesy, into the social background of the place of worship’s supporters, reminding them, in a friendly manner, that he ‘is aware of their aristocratic lineage’ – which was sufficient grounds for arrest under communist regimes. Continuing his assault, with the same smiling air, the affable mayor tells his interlocutors that he also remembers the Barateli family’s address, their attendance at his inauguration ceremony – including the soap bubbles blown by Keti – emphasising with candour: ‘I see everything! I notice everything!’ There is not a trace of aggression in these words; on the contrary, you get the impression that your oldest and closest friend is speaking to you with overflowing sincerity. “So… watch out for me!” continues Aravideze with the same gentleness in his voice. All this is part – as any survivor of communist dictatorships knows – of the tactics of the game. A game made all the more skilful by the fact that the ‘class enemies’ you wish to rid yourself of are more cultured and spiritually evolved than you, and therefore harder to control. ‘Although, in fact, that’s how life is,’ continues the ‘town’s big boss’ with the same patronising air, ‘some blow soap bubbles, others hunt down enemies of the people, artists burn with the fire of creative inspiration, beggars beg, criminals kill, and prostitutes – forgive me – work the streets, but is that normal?!”. Suddenly, a menacing pause shatters the calm tone of the speech, instantly evoking the overtones of Hitler’s hysterical tirades: “Is that normal, really?!”, after which the tone returns to being candid and gentle, as if nothing had happened: “That is how it was, but it will not be so any longer! We shall transform the city into a paradise. With your support and assistance, gentlemen!” A chill runs down the spectator’s spine at the promises of a ‘bright future, built by the working people, committed to the socialist revolution’—promises which concealed behind them maximum-security prisons, the political police and extermination camps.
I have commented on almost the entirety of Avtandil Maharadze’s acting performance, not only for his unique delivery but also for the subtlety of the screenplay, which, through a few strokes of an apparently good-natured yet ideologically charged monologue, to make the semantic shift from the image of a provincial mayor to that of history’s great tyrants, thereby rendering, in a masterful and unrepeatable cinematic portrait, the complex and protean magnetism of several monstrous dictators of the 20th century. Stylistically, this transfer is achieved through the mechanisms of synecdoche – one of the film’s many synecdoches, which construct the allegorical image of tyranny.
The fate of the defenders of the Church of the Mother of God is sealed. There are only four of them: the Barateli couple, ‘respectable Moșe’ and ‘respectable Mariam’ (as the mayor courteously calls them). The characters are reduced to their essentials, for the film operates within the dramatic conventions of the parable. None of them will escape the watchful eye of ‘Citizen Nobody’, who realises that eliminating his spiritual opponents is indispensable for him to attain the status of an absolute dictator. Aravidze’s modus operandi belongs to the theatre of the absurd. Elements of vaudeville and comic opera, employed in a sarcastic and grotesque manner to demonstrate the paranoid delirium and detachment from reality of the tyrant and his clique, alternate with elements of the iconic and the sublime, in which the champions of Truth, Goodness and Tradition are portrayed – that is, the people of God – the only ones who have the courage and moral strength to oppose and resist tyranny, even at the cost of their lives.
This axis, stretching from socio-political good and evil to the metaphysical and divine planes – the three planes on which the drama unfolds – is traced discreetly, without didacticism, in strokes that are initially allusive, then increasingly firm and convincing. Thus, in the end, the film’s message rings out clearly and unambiguously. Dictatorship, regardless of its political hue, is the embodiment of Evil and the Devil on earth. For what it seeks to steal from people is not merely their freedom, but their very souls.
The first to be arrested are the two elderly men – the most harmless and defenceless of all. Ready to offer up his own freedom in exchange for theirs, Sandro bravely intercedes on their behalf with Aravidze’s boss, Mihail Korișeli, a decent activist and an educated man, who is his friend and tries to help him: “There must have been a mistake, but we’ll sort it out!”, he firmly believes.
Here is yet another cliché from the repertoire of political police hypocrisy: feigning a judicial error to arrest opponents against whom there are no conclusive charges.
It is astonishing how the film frequently makes use of such clichés – semiotic signs of dictatorial language and mechanisms – within a narrative and artistic discourse that sparkles with originality and persuasive power. This originality lies precisely in the unique and unusual marriage of the rhetoric of the party and the political police, on the one hand, and the sumptuous language of high art on the other: opera, ancient theatre, traditional Georgian song, the world’s great poetry – all bearers of pure beauty and lofty moral ideals. The combination of these two opposing registers creates an anti-dictatorial satirical bomb of overwhelming power. Hence the perception, particularly at the time of its release, of the film’s strongly subversive – and therefore dangerous – nature.
Aravidze’s next intrusion into the Barateli family’s life is even more intrusive and carries an even more threatening tone: The dictator turns up unannounced, at night, at the couple’s home, dressed in the imposing robe of a Georgian shepherd and accompanied by his inseparable Doxopoulos and another aide, and leaves the house with a deft leap through the window: an allusion to the dreaded night-time raids by the secret police during the communist or fascist eras of terror. Except that the ‘cat’ continues to toy with its victim: it does not yet scratch, but instead displays its power and seductive charms, staging spectacles of self-glorification and the circus, in order to confuse and emotionally subdue its victim, or to win them over to its side.
The dictator behaves with excessive courtesy towards his hosts: he kisses the hand and the hem of the dress of the distinguished Nino, throwing himself to the ground before her and declaring himself her eternal admirer, he also kisses the hand of little Keti, to whom he presents an innocent yet ominous little cage with canaries. He humbly asks for forgiveness for the mistake of arresting the two elderly people, who have now been released, and behaves in accordance with the customs of a formal yet warm family visit: it is no coincidence that he has brought along his young son, Abel, hidden beneath the hem of his fur-trimmed robe. The painter’s home is also his studio, his gallery and the museum housing his art collections: after this strident display of friendship, Aravidze is left speechless by the artist’s personal art collection. Two emotions successively surface on the face of the protean actor Avtandil Maharadze: envy and recognition of Sandro’s unrivalled virtues. The first feeling remains forever unspoken, whilst the second is declared in a flattering and repetitive manner, until the praise turns into a threat. The script’s handling of the subtexts of propagandistic language is of unrivalled calibre:
‘Any of your works could grace the finest museums in the world. This is the sort of painting we need: serious, meditative, profound. Dear Sandro, might it not be possible for our contemporaries too to have such spiritualised and inspired faces, rather than closed, soulless features, all resembling one another? Why can we not depict a young contemporary working woman in the guise of a Madonna? Nothing can be more beautiful than a person at work! Of course, you will have your detractors. They will say that you are creating studio art, boudoir art, which is, in practice, an escape from reality. And I would reply: escape from reality means rising towards a higher reality. The people need the greatest reality of all! Although do you realise how our enemies might twist the meaning of your works? As an incitement to anarchy! Dear Sandro, if only you knew what sort of uneducated people we’re dealing with… it would be interesting to get inside their heads, to see what’s going on in there… Now artists like you must be on our side, not soulless craftsmen! You have a great mission: you must enlighten the people, raise their cultural level!”
To this skilful and insidious invitation to collaboration, Sandro replies curtly, with dignity and without a trace of pride: – “How do you think that I, with my paintings, or you, with the efforts you are making, could enlighten a people who created The Brave Man in Tiger’s Skin1? A people can only be enlightened by their spiritual shepherd: the moral hero!’
The failure of the seduction tactic is plain to see on Aravidze’s face, which has grown sour. The camera loses sight of his features from the close-up of that direct emotional exchange, the Dictator now hiding in the dark shadows of the art gallery. From there, he falls silent, seemingly defeated, yet he does not give in: in a few moments he regains his good-natured, friendly demeanour, his gaze once again concealed by the hypnotic pince-nez, and his duplicity takes on a sarcastic, menacing tone: – ‘Modesty makes a man more attractive. You’re right, dear Sandro, what sort of spiritual shepherd am I?! But bear with me a little! Don’t rush us! Time will bring forth the hero! Perhaps very soon the time of trial will come for you and for me!”
Fragments from the Securitate’s records, detailing the behaviour patterns of the more educated interrogators, emerge from the darkness of the audience’s collective memory.
The camera focuses on the Barateli family’s crucifix, which the two children, Keti and Abel, are talking about, and the tone of the conversation changes radically. “Why was Christ tortured?” asks the boy. ‘For the truth!’ replies Keti, who unwittingly counters Aravidze’s torrent of lies, whilst at the same time giving little Abel a vivid lesson in the theology of the soul, learnt from her mother: “But do not be afraid, He has risen and is in heaven! That is where the souls of the good go, whilst the wicked cannot reach it, for their souls are weighed down by sin and drag them down.”
“This crucifix works miracles; it can grant any wish!” – continues the angelic little girl. “Any miracle? Can it bring my mother back to life too?” – asks the Dictator’s son, thereby revealing a family secret. The seraphic Nino, who had just entered the room carrying a sumptuous fruit platter – as if plucked from an allegorical painting from the Low Countries – embraces the son of their future persecutor with motherly warmth, whispering warmly that his mother is in heaven, watching over him. It is he, the young and still innocent Abel, who, years later, will bring a case against Keti for desecrating graves and demand her wrongful committal to a mental asylum, on the basis of falsified diagnoses—exactly as his father, Varlam, would do to his boss, who had dared to stand in his way. Within these parameters—of modesty, courage and honesty—with which the partisans of Truth, Good and absolute Beauty, and the intelligent, persuasive and grotesque spectacle that characterises the acolytes of Lies and those who covet absolute Power on earth, the stylistic register of this great cinematic parable unfolds.
During the same visit, the histrionic dictator also demonstratively performs a strident operatic solo, recites an impressive Shakespearean sonnet, and sings lively Georgian trills side by side with his acolytes, as if seeking to prove to the distinguished family of artists that the ‘working class’ too is cultured and has an eye for art.
The chiaroscuro interiors, dominated by red, black and brown, with faint touches of white, in which the characters’ outlines are not entirely distinct, lend the mise-en-scène a meditative, Rembrandt-like quality: this colour scheme and atmosphere are found in all the film’s interior settings. Nino’s courtly yet unearthly sober costume—a heavy red silk gown, floor-length, with a small white fur wreath on her head— places her within the Renaissance tradition from which the painter Sandro draws his favourite inspiration, bestowing upon her a mystical regal stature, whilst also situating her within universal Christian symbolism: holiness and martyrdom.
Despite the dictatorial mayor’s clownish antics, the Barateli couple immediately realise who they are dealing with. Their natural instinct is to flee from their persecutor, but a prophetic dream whispers to Nino that he will find them even in the bowels of the earth. Famous scenes in the history of cinema include the sequence of the chase through the deserted town, led by the vehement Aravidze and his armoured henchmen, at times galloping on horseback, at times driving in the dreaded black car, and, above all, the shot of the couple buried up to their necks in freshly ploughed earth, yet discovered even there: the secret police will find you even in a snake’s hole! The long, white shirts worn by the two fugitives emphasise their martyr-like status. The symbolism is so clear and accessible to any cultural tradition that it hardly needs commenting on: the dictatorial tragedies of the 20th century unfolded across every continent, so this silent sequence is understood without words. Through his new operatic tirade—far more syncopated than the first—delivered in front of the fugitives discovered in the ground, Varlam rejoices in his victory.
The prophecy from Nino’s dream comes true: the attempt to escape is in vain! Their persecutors are always one step ahead of them. Soldiers in armour immediately storm Barateli’s house, repeating the Gospel greeting ‘Peace be upon this house!’ with reversed meaning. The Antichrist constantly imitates Christ, but reverses His essence through mockery and derision.
Sandro is summoned by the men in black, who have once again made an unannounced raid on his home for a brief interrogation, whilst his house is stripped of its paintings until it lies bare. The prophecy comes true. Sandro and Nino sense what is to come; the audience senses it too, and yet the story unfolds with undiminished emotion. The authenticity and sincerity of the emotions of the two protagonists, Sandro and Nino (portrayed by David Gheorghiobiani and Ketevan Abuladze), as well as those of the other actors—even the supporting cast—lend the entire film, both in its details and as a whole, an enduring freshness and great emotional power. Of course, the cinematography, handled by Mihail Agranovici, with its meticulous and sensitive use of light, brings out the characters’ expressiveness and often speaks for them. The dramatic chiaroscuro effects, shrouded in darkness, and the celestial, Renaissance-inspired portraiture – in which shadow enhances the light and both speak of the unseen – lend substance to moments of great symbolic and emotional weight.
The narrative follows the classic narrative of Stalinist deportations. Short, dense sequences, brimming with dramatic intensity, outline the tragic chronicle of the deportations.
One of the film’s most striking scenes, with its painful historical weight, is the endless queue at the counter where the relatives of political prisoners try to find out news of their loved ones: where are they? In which camp or prison? Are they still alive? The authorities are stingy with information; those arrested and deemed dangerous are denied the right to correspond, and their relatives are told nothing about their fate, not even the place of their detention. In front of Nino, who is also waiting, along with her daughter, to hear news of Sandro, the heart-rending wailing of a woman in front of the counter conveys the anguish of someone who does not know how to mourn the missing man: whether among the living or the dead. Nino receives the same reply: ‘no right to correspond’ – the verdict for prisoners deemed the most dangerous ‘enemies of the people’. The film fully captures the tragedy of history. In a long and famous poem, the writer Anna Akhmatova immortalised this tragic cliché. Millions of relatives of those arrested and deported, waiting in an endless queue to find out even a scrap of news about their loved ones, depict a tragic lament, of unearthly proportions, of the endless suffering of those whose lives were cut short. An additional form of psychological torture – the uncertainty over the fate of their loved ones – was inflicted upon their relatives by the authorities.
In her desperate plea for an exemption, Nino swallows her pride and goes to see Varlam, before whom she prostrates herself to the ground, kissing the tip of his shoe, repeating, in reverse, his former gesture of bravado. But the Dictator is relentless.
This painful scenario of the Golgotha of the gulags also includes the episode – perhaps the most heart-rending – of searching for the belongings of the deportees amongst the logs brought by rail from Siberia. The episode is true, the director explains: one day, in the 1950s, a consignment of timber was brought to the station in the port of Batumi; the locals discovered by chance that Georgian markings had been carved into the tree trunks: the names and labour camps of the prisoners who had felled them. A huge crowd gathered to seek news of relatives who had disappeared behind bars. But very few found out anything. This heart-rending search – more like a disoriented wandering through a silent forest of severed tree trunks, much like severed destinies – is depicted with sublime emotional intensity. The otherworldly vibrations of the lamento by the great Estonian composer Arvo Pärt resound broadly, like a cosmic prayer. Filmed at times up close, scrutinising the lifeless flesh of each tree trunk, and at other times from above, to follow the wandering of the grief-stricken characters through the timber yard, the camera tracks Keti’s chaotic dash amongst the fallen logs, amidst dirty puddles, goods lorries and stray dogs, as if through a circle of hell. A woman in mourning, elegantly dressed, weeps as she caresses, with lace gloves, a log engraved with rounded, weathered letters, with the fervour with which one embraces the body of a loved one – a discreet evocation of the Gospel scene ‘Pietà’. (We learn, from a later account, that in order to achieve the most faithful interpretation possible, the director had written the name of actress Mzia Mahviladze’s son on the log she was caressing!). Clutched tightly together after a fruitless search, wrapped in black woollen shawls as in wartime, mother and daughter mourn their grief together, in the same lament as in the ‘Pietà’. Keti sits down wearily on a log, watching the sawdust pour out, like an unbroken river, from a machine chipping away at the wood scraps, much like the lives of the gulag martyrs everywhere, reduced to sawdust. A heart-rending visual metaphor!
Deeply and indissolubly bound to her husband, Nino senses his impending end.
The moment when Sandro is made to meet his friend Mihail during the interrogation – Mihail being either mentally scarred by torture or merely feigning it – is a classic episode from the script of the psychological breakdown of prisoners in any totalitarian system – is rendered in a parodic, vaudeville-like vein, as though what ought to be shown were too cruel. The interrogators, two allegorical figures: in a lush garden, a muse of justice and a baroque phantom, as if plucked from a frivolous operetta, play a parody of a wedding march on an aristocratic white piano: a caricature of the nobility, of justice, of happiness and of heaven. The questions posed by the operetta-style investigator are phantasmagorical, attempting to incriminate the defendants of grandiose global conspiracies. Mihail, dressed in a tattered white smock reminiscent of a madhouse, had tried in vain to play along in order to ease his plight, and now he is striving to convince Sandro too to accept the absurd pretence of the investigation, taking upon himself a host of fictitious crimes against the state and social order. A painful, seemingly unprovoked scream bursts from Mihail’s chest, interrupting his monologue, like a confession from the depths of his soul: the cry, punctuated by stifled silences, gradually turns into a roar of unbearable pain, and the unfortunate man collapses senseless onto the grand piano. By virtue of the screenwriting principle of ‘doubles’ – a compositional rule of musical origin – we understand that a similar fate awaits Sandro too.
Woken by the flames of the church’s explosion, Nino senses that her husband has died: the crowd watches in horror as the explosion’s fires rage, whilst in a basement Sandro dies in agony, hanging from a dome, under the blind gaze of the allegorical goddess of justice, her head reflected upside down in the puddle on the cellar floor, until the image is completely distorted and blurred. The visual message is clear: justice does not exist! The resemblance between Sandro’s Christ-like face, contorted with pain, and certain images from the iconography of the Crucifixion speaks volumes. Abuladze’s imagery ingeniously blends – here and in other iconic moments of the film – elements of the naturalism found in Catholic art with the discreet dignity and modesty of Orthodox iconography.
As he eliminates his opponents, Aravidze drops his masks; his speeches come to resemble the agitational, revolutionary rhetoric of communist dictators, whilst his grimace, now captured in close-up, evokes Hitler’s spasmodic hysteria: ‘We must not trust people! We must be vigilant, we must know how to unmask our enemies! ... Which is all the more difficult given that, for every three people, four are our enemies! Yes, yes! Do not be surprised! For an enemy, in quantitative terms, is more than a friend. So it has always been, and so it will always be.’ Absurdity, hatred and incitement to denunciation are rife, whilst the adulating crowd applauds.
When lawless people swarm everywhere, the only recourse left to the defenders of truth is silence and martyrdom.
Although she is warned to flee, Nino is seized along with her daughter before she can save herself: fatally, soldiers in black armour appear at her house, with the same greeting from the inverted Gospel: ‘Peace be upon this house!’. A hearse carries the two women to an unknown destination. One of the film’s most harrowing moments, which needs no musical accompaniment, is the parting of mother and daughter, as two pairs of hands cling, on either side, to the same bars: on one side, the mother, trying to comfort her daughter, disappears into the darkness of the cell (her last words are ‘Don’t be afraid, Keti!’), on the other, Keti, screaming, is torn away from her mother by state security agents and taken to an unknown destination.
This is the story of the unfortunate confectioner, presented before the jury as justification for the charge of desecrating the grave of her parents’ torturer. The present-day narrative, set in Soviet Georgia in the mid-1970s, focuses on the Dictator’s family’s reaction to Ketevan’s demand for justice, to demonstrate that the evil of totalitarianism – embodied in the film by the mafia-like system of the dictatorial political class – continues to persist and dominate from the shadows within an apparently democratised society, and that the only path to redemption from this infernal vicious circle is not a worldly one, nor does it fall within external jurisdiction, but is an ontological, mystical one: repentance to the point of self-sacrifice, that is, metanoia.
The justice sought by the daughter of the political prisoners does not, however, stem from a vindictive liberal mindset, but belongs to the sacred law of the land, a law that transcends social systems and is rooted in ancient Georgian traditions: Ketevan solemnly demands of the judges, on her own behalf and ‘on behalf of all those unjustly punished’, that the torturer’s body be exhumed by his own family, to be left as prey for the ravens. In response to the Dictator’s family’s stunned protests, Ketevan explains, as if inspired by archaic wisdom: He cannot be buried, because ‘to bury him means to forgive him and to consign all his misdeeds to oblivion’. Yet the blood of the innocent cries out to heaven – this is the subtext of Ketevan’s explanation.
An ancestral belief in the goodness or righteousness of the earth, which gives us life and must therefore not be defiled by the bodies of sinners beyond the bounds of nature, still prevails in the Christian heartland of the Caucasus. Even the act of judgement of old, in the ‘council of elders’, was not intended as punishment or worldly vengeance, but served a pedagogical purpose: the moral reformation of the wrongdoer and those complicit in the sin, in accordance with that same eternal moral law to which both the wrongdoer and his victim are subject, in bearing that same collective Cross.
In other words, the healing response to tyranny and injustice cannot come from liberal ideology or formal justice, but only from the perspective of traditional wisdom, a wisdom that breathes within the realm of the sacred – as Abuladze suggests here and throughout the rest of his trilogy. Even though the explicitly sacred is present in Repentance through only a few elements – yet these are pivotal elements, essential to the dynamics of the conflict: the funeral rite, with its profound initiatory significance; self-sacrifice, with its function of social atonement; the theme of the shepherd of the people (exemplified by the painter and compromised by the Dictator) and the church: the historical, persecuted church, defended by the faithful but torn down by the Dictator; the one rebuilt, decades later, from whipped cream and marzipan – that is, from the joy of the heart – a metaphor for the inner church; but also the church – the meaning of life, that sought by the elderly wanderer in the epilogue, whose line – ‘What is the point of a road that does not lead to a church?’ – firmly and memorably underscores the film’s coda. The actress playing this memorable cameo role is the legendary Veriko Anjaparidze, hailed as a ‘queen of Georgian and Soviet theatre’, who had been performing on stage since the days of silent film and was 87 years old at the time of filming!
The final part of the film, set in the 1970s, is an extensive character study of the ‘presidential’ family and clique, demonstrating the enduring nature of evil in history and the superhuman difficulty of atoning for it. The accused Ketevan’s demand is used as a pretext by the Dictator’s family to accuse her of insanity and request her committal, on the basis of a forged medical certificate, in a mental asylum – a plot which, set against the backdrop of the 1970s, continues the political conflict of the 1950s, proving that the political mafia, despite the liberalisation of society, is far from dead.
Of the dictatorial family, only Tornike, Varlam’s teenage nephew, is capable of compassion and untouched by compromise with those in power. The others – namely the docile Abel and his wife, the jaded Guliko – under the guise of being exemplary citizens, have exploited the advantages of their position, being fully aware – as the film indirectly reveals – of the misdeeds committed by the head of their family in order to secure and maintain their privileges. At the trial, Guliko, the city’s spoilt first lady, shouts at Ketevan like a slum shrew and behaves like a cruel, cunning schemer when she proposes the abusive committal of her accuser to a mental asylum. The apathetic Abel, perpetually under his father’s protective wing and at the beck and call of his rapacious wife—with whom he has become complicit in compromises and misdeeds—has lost his moral compass and can no longer distinguish good from evil, light from darkness, the divine from the infernal. He will remain deaf to the pleas for mercy and humanity made by his son Tornike.
The only one in the family whose spirit remains uncorrupted, the only one who knew nothing of Varlam’s crimes and who loved him selflessly, is Tornike: he alone feels the family’s guilt acutely and asks for forgiveness, on his own behalf and that of his kin, to Mrs Barateli, who, however, points out to him that forgiveness (for collective crimes) lies solely in God’s hands, and calmly awaits her admission to the asylum. Outraged by such injustice and by the crass indifference of his parents, who refuse to repent even at the eleventh hour, Tornike vehemently calls them to account, coming to the confectioner’s defence, but they treat him with condescension and cynicism. Following a heated exchange with his father, the boy takes his own life with the rifle once given to him as a gift by his grandfather.
It is only this extreme act that awakens Abel’s remorse: his lament, with which he mourns in solitude the soul lost, perhaps for eternity, strikes a chord that is both ancestral and metaphysical. Only a people who have managed to perpetuate their multi-millennial tradition to this day can give voice to such a harrowing sense of lament and self-humiliation, as searing as the act of self-mutilation whilst still alive, as portrayed by the incomparable Avtandil Maharadze. In his harrowing, yet belated, act of repentance, his image splits painfully in the shattered mirror of a duplicitous conscience (the composition of the shot is brilliant, synthesising such profound meanings within a single frame) and Abel realises with horror that the one to whom he is confessing is the Devil: the unseen monk who, with his filthy hands, devours a raw fish—the unrepentant man with whom Abel had long been in league through his scheming and who knows all his secrets.
In the end, it is Abel himself who digs up his father’s body and hurls it into the abyss, to be devoured by the ravens. The words of the one sacrificed without fault were fulfilled by the very hand of the executioner! The martyr’s command becomes law, for his word is animated by his blood sacrificed for God; the martyr’s word possesses divine power. Herein lies the inner strength of the ancestral ‘judgement of the earth’ and its quintessentially Christian essence. The martyr, through his self-sacrificing act, fulfils his will in history, often even by the hand of his executioners. This is the divine economy of the Christian sacrifice, lived out by our ancestors beyond any scholastic theology, and preserved to this day in the Christian Caucasus, as shown to us by Tengiz Abuladze.
The film draws to a close in the very same kitchen where Ketevan bakes her little church-shaped cakes, and at the very moment when the news of Varlaam’s death is announced by the friendly neighbour Apollon, as if nothinghad happened, in perfect concentric symmetry. The successive circles of the story close; the narrator’s voice enters and exits the circles of worldly events, yet the ontological meaning it opens up belongs to eternity.
An ancient Georgian prophecy states that the Last Judgement will take place in Iviria, at Tsetsekhoveli. A disturbing prophecy! Abuladze, in Repentance, explains why: it seems that the Georgians have preserved within their very being the knowledge of the theandric judgement, not born of a desire for vengeance, punishment or the ‘rational restoration of the divine order’, but a judgement made in love and shared suffering of the same cross – a judgement which the civilisations of western Europe, which trace their origins to Roman law, have lost. It is no coincidence that the goddess of justice dies in the film, but the ancestral law of the land does not.
Much has been said about this film from a political perspective. Most analyses explore this aspect, in one interpretation or another. They are right, for the film’s aesthetic serves, at first glance, the political. But beyond the political lies the human. For the redemptive solution in the film does not come from the political sphere, whatever its hue, but from the deepest human core of being, from where the human heart merges with Christ. The metaphysical and Christian dimension of the film Repentance must be rediscovered in all its depths!
Further reading
Irina Bagrationi-Mukhraneli, ‘Repentance’ by T. Abuladze and Perestroika // Political Events of the 1980s–1990s and Literary Discourse, Proceedings of the International Symposium, Part II, TSU Press, Tbilisi, 2019. (I haven’t read it, but it’s a good one), pp. 182–212.
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An epic poem, a masterpiece in verse by the great Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli (18th century).