‘The Antique’: Seville Review

Dir/scr: Rusudan Glurjidze. Georgia/Switzerland/Finland/Germany. 2024. 132mins

State politics wreaks havoc in the lives of four very different individuals in Rusudan Glurjidze’s second feature The Antique, an odd-couple drama that largely plays out in a St Petersburg that seems utterly indifferent to their plight. Set against the backdrop of the 2006 deportation of thousands of Georgians from Russia, this carefully crafted, darkly surreal and politically engaged film subtly depicts how state power moulds us, its deceptively amiable mood simmering with underlying violence from the very first frame before it later ignites. 

Carefully crafted, darkly surreal and politically engaged 

Following a decree over copyright issues which may have had its roots in Russian-Georgian politics,The Antique, one of the last foreign-funded films to have been shot in Russia, was initially suspended from being screened in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori sidebar before being readmitted. Like Glurjidze’s first film House Of Others (2016), a similar combination of realism and dark poetry, The Antique has been selected as Georgia’s Academy Awards submission. Now playing in Seville, the film is teeming with ideas which crucially never over-impose themselves on the unfolding drama, and should attract further festival attention.

It is 2006, and ageing, cantankerous, opera-loving Vadim (Sergey Dreyden, who died in 2023) lives alone in a large Saint Petersburg apartment. The apartment is up for sale at a knockdown price because Vadim want to carry on living there until he dies. Bringing an explosion of energy and colour to the chilly apartment, Georgian Medea (Salome Demuria) moves in, having – like many Georgians at the time – sold up and moved to Russia in search of better times. Sharp and vivacious, she is treated terribly by the old patriarch Vadim, but a curious and affecting odd-couple relationship unfolds between them.

Medea works in a shop selling antiques that have been illegally bought in from Georgia: the boss is upstairs and only communicates to employees through speakers in the ceiling, a remnant of old Soviet modes of surveillance that Medea mercilessly pokes fun at. She’s been followed to Russia by Lado (Vladimir Daushvili), whom for reasons unknown – perhaps simply because he’s a bit of an idiot - she initially rejects but then, almost out of pity, she invites into the apartment. Scenes of gentle farce ensue, with Lado accidentally breaking Vadim’s beloved record player. Later, a fourth figure will join in: Peter (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), Vadim’s son – a chip off the patriarchal block who finds himself uncomfortably straddled between the old world, via his reluctant allegiance to his father, and the new, through his attraction to Medea.

There is a darkness about Vadim’s working life that Medea learns nothing about because, on Vadim’s own reckoning, she wouldn’t want to know. Whatever he was up to, this human relic has been left utterly alone, essentially without friends or family, taking comfort only from his culture and his solitary visits to a sports hall where he watches youngsters playing curling matches in surreal slow motion scenes. Dreyden – who, on one reading, may be the antique of the title – gives a towering swansong performance of nuance, arresting physicality and unexpected tenderness. Demuria too delivers a fine performance as a pragmatic survivor who has learned to sidestep the worst of an ugly, man-made world but who, you suspect, no longer trusts anyone enough to get close to them.

The darkness inside these characters also haunts the film: this is a realm in which nothing is quite right, and which is built on fragile foundations. Radio propaganda from Vladimir Putin is heard, stating that historically, Georgia doesn’t exist – and soon enough we are seeing Georgians in Russia – Lado among many others – being rounded up by the security forces and put in vans to be deported, as actually occurred in 2006. 

The chilly, stately beauty of Saint Petersburg under snow is celebrated in carefully composed images by Basque DoP Gorka Gomez Andreu, none more evocative than judiciously composed, repeated aerial shots of a tiny Vadim crossing a bridge in his signature woollen hat against the city’s immense backdrop. Cluttered, shadowy interiors, full of antiques that everyone seems to want to sell to make a quick buck, are a large part of the film’s mood.