A Return to the Wry Human Comedies of Otar Iosseliani

Why, you might ask, did The Asia Society recently host restorations of three films by a French director? This is a trick question that goes to distinctions of geography and aesthetic. Otar Iosseliani (1934-2023) was not born in France. His family hailed from Georgia, a nation in the Caucasus region shoehorned between two continents. As such, its polity is an admixture of different sociological currents and has been at the mercy of competing and often destructive political interests. Georgians tend to lean European in their customs. On the map, it is an Asian nation.Iosseliani studied music in his native Tbilisi, but found his calling upon attending Moscow’s Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. He studied with a pioneering filmmaker, Lev Kuleshov, and like his mentor, ran afoul of Communist dictates. He consequently shucked the cinema for metallurgy and commercial fishing. Still, the cinema wouldn’t let him go. His first feature, “Falling Leaves” (1966), was banned because of (as Ioselliani put it) “some stupid symbolism.” The film went on to gain significant international notice.“Falling Leaves” was markedly different from the standard product being issued by the USSR. Its tone and tempo were diffuse and tenderly stated. The plotting, while hewing to a certain linearity, was discursive. There may be Georgian antecedents for the lyrical strain of absurdism fueling Iosseliani’s vision, but the overall gist is in line with directors like Jean Vigo, René Clair, Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls and Jacques Tati. That is to say, a bunch of Frenchmen.The Asia Society screened three of Iosseliani’s Georgian movies, “Falling Leaves,” “There Once Was A Singing Blackbird” (1971), and what is considered by many as his finest movie, “Pastorale” (1975). Iosseliani packed his bags in 1982 and moved to France having had enough of headbutting with the Soviet authorities. This is where the Metrograph and a streaming service, Klassiki, help carry the ball in mounting “Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life.” It is, we are told, “the most extensive retrospective of [Ioselliani’s] work to appear in New York in a dog’s age.” Those who missed the Asia Society program can catch up with the pictures downtown.“Falling Leaves” is solid place to start with Iosseliani, though a degree of patience is warranted on the audience’s part. This director’s films don’t flow like a river; they converge like tributaries. Their whimsys accumulate with an increasing sense of purpose and irony. The film begins with documentary-like scenes of rural Georgians hard at work culling grapes for wine, but then moves to Tbilisi where we meet a green, awkward and basically good hearted vintner, Nico (Ramaz Giorgobiani). He spends his time mooning over a flighty co-worker, insisting on quality controls that run contrary to governmental directives, and learning that the autocracy is as fickle as it is unyielding. It’s rare to encounter a coming of age story in which fatalism is both powered and redeemed by forgiveness. “Falling Leaves” is a wonderful motion picture.“Favorites of the Moon” (1984), the title comes from Shakespeare’s “Henry VI, Part 1,” was the first film Iosseliani made upon arriving in Paris and it firmly established the erstwhile Georgian as the cinematic equivalent of Honoré de Balzac. Do you want La Comédie humaine? Here it is in a little under two hours as we are made privy to the lives of an array of Parisians whose fortunes, for better and worse, are intertwined. Punk rockers, hairdressers, arms dealers, assassins, terrorists, prostitutes and sundry others slip in, over and under France’s economic and moral stratum to telling effect. All the while the director favors sound over dialogue and observation over commentary.“When things are taken very seriously,” Iosseliani said, “it is hard to talk about them seriously.” Serious business will definitely be afoot during the coming weeks at the Metrograph.

A Return to the Wry Human Comedies of Otar Iosseliani

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