Known as the "First Spring Swallow" of the Soviet film reform, "Repentance" is the first of a trilogy by Cengiz Abradze, a famous contemporary director of the Soviet Union, a popular actor of the Soviet Union, a Lenin Prize winner and a recipient of the State Prize of the Georgian Republic. Three. The first two are "Prayer" and "Wish Tree". Ablaze is one of the representatives of contemporary "poetry cinema". His works always show a stunning beauty. Laughter and tears, joy and sorrow, grotesque and tragedy, reality and fantasy are all intertwined in the atmosphere of folk narrative poetry deeply connected with Georgian national culture.
Invitation (1967) is a film about tradition and revenge. Set against the backdrop of the snow-capped peaks of Georgia, it reproduces the classical poetry of the famous Georgian poet Vaza Pushavira, and narrates the tragic fate of a man who dared to defy the cruel customs of the tribe. The Tree of Wishes (1977) is based on the poetry collection of the same name by the contemporary Georgian poet Georgy Leonidze. The film is based on the rural life of Georgia in the early 20th century, depicting the unfortunate love of a beautiful girl, and successfully reproduces a series of lyrical images in the poems. "Wish Tree" is a "poetry film" full of historical contemplation, which slams the dark and ignorant forces that destroy people's good wishes. The plot of "Repentance" is contemporary, but from the director's conception to the elaboration of the theme, it is in the same vein as "Prayer" and "Wish Tree". Ablazee has repeatedly emphasized the connection between "Repentance" and the first two films: "There is a theme that runs through all three films, and this is the 'innocent defendant'."
In the more than 30 years of creative practice, Ablaze has formed an artistic personality with distinctive philosophical and special aesthetic characteristics. In his works, the funny and the pathetic, the comic and the tragic are harmoniously combined to form a unified, expressive, poetic romantic style. In the film "Repentance", the director pays more attention to the thinking of the rise and fall of the nation, cultural genes, and the psychological structure of the characters, rather than chronicling historical events. The typicality of the character of Alavidze was formed in a "cultural layer" with a strong cultural color of ignorance, tyranny and patriarchal system. His psychological awareness, behavior, thinking mode, values, and human relations are bound to be restricted by this specific "cultural layer". Varram Alavidze is a scourge, a sin, and at the same time a product of society. Negative factors such as lust, lust, jealousy, violence, cruelty and other negative factors in his character are also intrinsically related to the specific era he lived in, and are infiltrated with the cultural codes of that specific historical period.
In his creative practice, Abrazer has developed a fairly solid relationship with the audience. The artist sincerely desires to express in his work what is urgent and important to him and his audience. In "Repentance", the director broke the taboo and vividly described the brutal persecution, illegal arrest, torture and hypocrisy of that particular historical era. With his unique complex and vivid metaphorical image language, Ablaze has reached a tacit understanding with the audience: the film does not tell about a specific historical person or event, and there is no need to examine when and where the story happened. The name of the film's protagonist, Varram Alavidze, means "no one" in Georgian. However, the audience can refract the image created by the artist into a specific character based on memory, and can refract the atmosphere expressed in the film into a long or not-so-distant history. With his inherent cultural accomplishment and deep understanding of national cultural history, the director briefly outlines a collective image of a dictator with exaggerated and comic style. The dictator on the screen has a Hitler-style toothbrush beard, wears the pince-nez of the secret police chief Beria, and has short Franco-style hair. Like Mussolini, he loves opera and is extravagant. He is not a specific historical figure. As the director said, he is "the collective image of the villains and dictators in the world in history, and the ruler who abuses the unlimited power in his hands may be Vallam Alawezer".
Abulaze diligently seeks a balance between the film's profoundly human content and stark expression. This harmony is successfully reflected in the shaping of several protagonists in The Repentance. The faces of artist Sandro and his wife Nino in the film are incredibly holy and beautiful. They stared at the audience in silence, so melancholy, so quiet and affectionate, that the audience couldn't take their eyes off it. The director uses this image beauty to express the dignity and value of human beings, and all of this is also a silent sentence of the dictator.
Ablazee chose to play the dictator father and son, Maharase, to emphasize the connection between the hidden sins of the father and the son. The spirit of the dictator-father lives on in the body of his son Averi. Maharaze successfully reproduces the process of the son's commemoration and respect for his father and the eventual liberation of himself from his father's spiritual shackles. In the process of creating the image of the dictator Alavidze, Maharazah put masks on the characters. This lunatic tyrant did everything he could to put on a show: to the common man, he was the city's kind and loving father; to the artist, he recited Shakespeare's sonnets and even sang arias from Verdi's operas; Those arrests, torture and shootings all seemed to be against his will and done by someone else. In fact, for him, watching people perish was a secret pleasure: it was his nature to use someone else's hand to play new ways of killing people. With the use of unexpected editing and special sound, Maharazai endows the character of Alaviza with a perverse and devilish color, revealing the dictator's sinister and cunning true face and dark and terrifying psychological state. . Maharazah's performance handling fits well with the film's absurd, surreal style.
"Repentance" contains director Ablaze's critical understanding of the negative factors in the national cultural psychology, and successfully expresses the director's deep grasp of the national cultural psychology.
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