Although I was an admirer of the works of Hollywood legends Rouben Mamoulian and Akim Tamiroff (whom I had mistaken for being Georgian), a Georgian friend just told me they are actually of Armenian descent...as is, after all now that I've checked, the controversial film-maker Sergei Paradjanov - although a street in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi has recently been named after him! In any case, upon alerting me that she was about to watch "a very old, patriotic Georgian movie from 1987", I made sure I made it the very first proper Georgian movie that I watch.
To get the negative aspects off my chest first, the copy I found on "You Tube" was so battered that the film seemed (at least) 20 years older than it actually was; to make matters worse, the English subtitles accompanying it were of the "auto-translate" variety which entails an almost constantly ungrammatical English translation with the odd Italian word thrown in for good measure. Fortunately, this wasn't my first attempt at watching a "broken English" version of a film made in a language foreign to me so the experience wasn't overly annoying and, in any case, the film itself was brief enough at just 83 minutes in length. The one thing about it I did find distracting was that the significant amount of French dialogue (which is a language I am familiar with) in it was all overdubbed in Georgian!
The storyline is very simple: a Georgian young man - named Giorgi, of course to emphasise the patriotic element - leaves his home country and travels throughout Europe in search of better prospects until he finally settles to a life as a cab driver in the French port city of Marseilles. One of his cab fares is a young French girl whom he marries faster than you can say "Miq'varkhar" (Georgian for "I love you") and they raise a family but, before long, the young man's heart is aching for his Georgian roots. Even so, he spends 60 years away from his home country and eventually dies without ever realizing his dream of going back.
To counter this plain narrative, we follow a complex structure of present-day sequences - showing Giorgi's grandson travelling from Marseilles to Georgia by train carrying an urn containing his grandfather's ashes - intertwined with flashback sequences depicting the child Giorgi with his relatives on the family farm, the young sailor Giorgi befriending his entrepreneurial lifelong friend Henri, Giorgi's cab-driving phase which takes him through WWII and beyond and, finally, the older Giorgi's melancholic twilight years (where he bemoans his apparent forgetfulness of his mother tongue) and his interactions with his grandson as boy and young man himself.
While the film-making style on display is not particularly notable (apart from the aforementioned cross-cutting structure), I found the following 5 sequences to be particularly outstanding: the delightful segment where Henri stumbles upon the idea of selling Matsoni (a Georgian type of yogurt) on the side and employs his stevedore friends to boost their sales and impress a potential backer; the "meeting cute" sequence between Giorgi and his future wife on a rainy night; the impromptu execution (and its aftermath) by Giorgi of a Gestapo officer during the performance of his day-job; another delightful sequence where the old Giorgi takes his grandson on a cab ride and they burst into a Georgian folk song; the powerful ending where the arrival of Giorgi's grandson at the train station is met by literally hundreds of people as if Giorgi's entire village came out to greet him. Although I'm far from being a patriot myself and local immigration issues are as topical as ever, I have to admit that this coda resonates universally and brought a lump to my throat.
