Three Georgian women, strong-willed matriarch Eka (90-year-old former dental assistant and fledgling star Esther Gorintin), her long-suffering daughter Marina (Nino Khomassouridze) and rebellious granddaughter Ada (“Freeze, Die, Come to Life”‘s Dinara Droukarova), all live together in their stately-yet-crumbling apartment in contemporary Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic. Eka pines for her beloved son Otar, a physician who is now a construction worker in Paris. Marina is deeply resentful of her mother’s obsession with her absent brother, while Ada endures their bickering and yearns for a more adventurous existence. When a friend of Otar’s calls with tragic news, Marina and Ada must make a seemingly impossible choice: Do they keep Eka from learning the truth?
Former assistant director to Bertrand Tavernier and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Bertuccelli deftly spins the delicate threads of familial conflict and maternal love into a bewitching tangle of intergenerational duplicity. (Mubi)
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