‘Gondola’: Tokyo Review

Dir/scr: Veit Helmer. Germany/Georgia. 2023. 82mins

In the mountain country of western Georgia, the village communities rely on a pair of cable cars that scale the precipitous valley sides every half hour. Returning to the area following the death of a relative, Iva (Mathilde Irrmann) takes a job as the conductor of one of the cable car pagodas and strikes up a long-distance friendship with Nina (Nini Soselia), her counterpart in the other cabin. Over time, these half-hourly encounters evolve into playful flirtations and then deepen into love, in this quirky, dialogue-free romance from German director Veit Helmer. It is an appealing trifle – undeniably lovely to look at – but even at a brisk 82 minutes in length, feels like a short film idea stretched to feature length.

You get the sense that Helmer fell in love with the location first and foremost

The film is a continuation of Helmer’s creative fascination with Georgia, sparked when he showed his acclaimed debut, Tuvalu (1999), at the Tbilisi Film Festival. Helmer subsequently made a short in the country, and then a feature, Absurdistan, which was shot with a Georgian crew in Azerbaijan and Georgia. That film went on to premiere in Sundance and win prizes at Athens at several other festivals. Sweet-natured and whimsically styled, this picture will also likely appeal to festival audiences with a taste for the work of Wes Anderson, Jeunet and Caro, and the theatrical, mime-adjacent confections of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. It is a pleasant diversion but, like the cable cars locked in their endless up-and-down cycle, it doesn’t really go anywhere.

Still, when the self-contained world in which the story unfolds is as gorgeous as this, perhaps it does not need to venture far. The quaint little pagodas, painted in weather-beaten orange and yellow, traverse a stunning backdrop of thickly forested mountains, meadows full of amiable cows, bee hives and glimpses of the photogenically rustic lives of the people below. Shot by Goga Devdariani (Taming The Garden), the film takes a palpable pleasure in the gentle rhythms of the mountain, and the pleasing simplicity of the cable car mechanism. Even the engine room, with its cheery sky-blue walls and its clunking cogs and pulleys, is a thing of beauty. You get the sense that Helmer fell in love with the location first and foremost, and that the wisp of a story is simply a means to explore the place and to share it with audiences.

There is a timeless quality to the picture, which feels modern in its LGBTQ+ themes but unmoored from the relentless connectivity of the present day. By stripping away the dialogue from the storytelling, Helmer forces his characters to communicate their feelings in other ways. The gondolas are customised by their resourceful conductors as ocean liners and space rockets. A chess game, played over the course of the day breaks the ice; elsewhere music features prominently. Nina serenades her colleague on her violin; Iva responds with a soulful trumpet solo. Then Nina hastily scrawls some sheet music and, in one particularly delightful scene, they play a brief duet, much to the irritation of their overbearing boss (Zviad Papuashvili), who holds a flame for Nina.

Inventive and charming as it is, however, there is a limit to the emotional depth that can be conveyed by fleeting, wordless glances between two gorgeous young women. When they finally meet, the connection feels overstretched. It is just as well then that, by this point, like the director, we are so smitten by this beguiling corner of the world that the thinness of the story itself hardly matters.