‘Guria’ Review: Everything Is Scarce but Charm Is Abundant in Georgia’s Deadpan Oscar Submission

There’s a certain wavelength of hangdog humor that denizens of the former Soviet Republics seem able to tune to at will, and Georgian director Levan Koguashvili more than most. In his fourth feature film, and his first since 2021’s “Brighton 4th” won top honors in Tribeca, Koguashvili’s starkly unsparing perspective on a nation rough-ridden by its recent history, is leavened by warm, mordantly funny characterization that gives this throwback, black-and-white vision of post-war division and penury its softer, medium-gray midtones. This tonal topography is as treacherous to navigate as a room littered underfoot with hazelnuts rolling around like ball-bearings, but if “Guria” occasionally skids off-balance, it quickly recovers, delivering a drolly delightful, minor-key antidote to the cacophonous shrillness of modern life.

It is the 1990s, Georgia is newly independent of Russia, and the subsequent Georgian Civil War has recently ended. But relative political stability but has not brought much in the way of economic optimism. Or perhaps it just hasn’t reached Guria, a small town in the rural west, famous for its harmonic singing tradition (a particularly gorgeous example of which opens the film, with other songs scattered throughout like gemstones in the mud) which remains poor enough that a municipal beauty pageant can offer a food processor — beg pardon — a food processor and its instruction booklet, as its top prize. Saturnine, stubbly 40-something Zuriko (Kakhaber Tcholadze) is one of the many Gurians feeling the sudden-capitalist pinch: he cannot find anyone willing to pay a fair price for his high-quality hazelnuts even though, he insists “Nine out of ten are sound.”

He later revises that estimate to eight out of ten when talking to his best friend Gela (Vamekh Jangidze), but whatever. These are some good nuts. And so when he gets a line on a buyer in a neighboring village willing to go as high as five rubles, he jumps at the chance, even though it means abandoning Irma (Eka Sharikhadze) the prospective new wife who has travelled to Guria to meet him. Zuriko is the widower father to teenage son Achi (Sergi Kviloria), and has decided, with the collusion of seemingly half the village including his former mother-in-law Veriko (Tamia Kalandadze), to remarry. Veriko, however is mightily unimpressed by the sophisticated, sunglassed and manicured Irma, who might have a very fine siging voice but who cannot pluck a chicken to save her life. In any case, it ends up not mattering much for Zuriko’s love life, as his eye is quickly taken instead by singing teacher Maia (Natia Nikolaishvili) a new arrival to the village, who seems highly, if shyly, receptive to Zuriko’s inarticulate, stone-faced attentions.

But in the meantime, on their nut-selling quest, Zuriko and Gela are unfortunately — though perhaps inevitably, given that in these parts Murphy’s law is the only law strictly observed — waylaid by highway robbers. In the ensuing, comically inept exchange of shotgun fire, both friends are injured, as is bandit leader Kakucha (Vakho Chkhartisvili). He, it turns out, also has a teenage son, Beso (Davit Natsvaladze), who is in a romantic rivalry with Achi over their classmate Eka (Anamaria Kamladze) a pretty girl who strings them both along until Beso, the bad-boy apple falling not too far from the bandit tree, takes matters into his own hands.

The screenplay, co written by Koguashvili, Boris Frumin and Georgi Kekelidze is thus packed with incident and, at almost two hours, perhaps has a digression or two too many. But it’s such an affectionately exasperated portrait of a community that it’s hard to begrudge the witty details that lend it such lived-in texture. There’s the clinic where the electricity is failing; the school with its apparently daily grenade drills; the choir practice sessions where craggy-faced locals produce incongruously sweet harmonies. And if Koguashvili has a signature tic, it’s his very enjoyable habit of having the wry camera (wielded by co-cinematographers Gigi Samsonadze and Giorgi Shvelidze) pick up on some borderline surreal element — a goat in the mayor’s office, for example — and not until a few scenes later letting us in on the logical, if never less than ridiculous, reasoning behind it.

If there is a little myopia here, it is around the social pressures bearing down on the women of the community. Maia is superbly played by Nikolaishvili, especially in an amusing scene where, in a huff at Zuriko flirting with some bathing beauties at the beach, she stomps off indignantly, stopping only to turn back and kick sand at him like a toddler having a tantrum. But aside from her, and especially around Eka and the quite barbaric “bride kidnapping” incident that powers the drama of the film’s second half, the women are drawn with less dimension and less compassion than the men, making “Guria” both a comment on Georgian patriarchy but also to some degree an unwitting party to it.

Not that Georgian masculinity, with its macho, bellicose posturing and archaic codes of honor, is portrayed as anything other than fumbling and futile. But however janky, the system just about works for the ornery menfolk muddling their way through it, with their many beefs mostly resolved with a bottle of lethally alcoholic local tipple chacha, or a punch to the face, or both. And receiving most of those punches, often as a peace negotiation tactic to settle a conflict for which he is not to blame, there’s Gela, Zuriko’s long-suffering best mate — their unquestioned, doggedly loyal bromance gives “Guria” its heart as, with humor and wisdom and a few flaws of its own, it peers into the beautifully wonky workings of the Georgian soul.