‘Otar’ celebrates women at the heart of families

Julie Bertuccelli readily admits that her first feature film, “Since Otar Left ... ,” “is about me and my matriarchal family.” Set in Tbilisi, Georgia, “Otar” deftly weaves a portrait of life in the struggling former Soviet republic with the tale of three generations of women living under one roof and longing for the absent son, Otar, who has immigrated to Paris with the hope of a better life.

Bertuccelli, 36, who has a warm and casual style, talked about “Otar” last fall in New York, where it was being screened at the New York Film Festival. The film is just beginning its theatrical run in L.A.

Though Bertuccelli lives in Paris, she set the film in Tbilisi and created the characters of Eka, Marina and Ada to protect “my real intention about these women,” she said, speaking in a mock stage whisper in reference to the characters’ similarity to herself, her mother and her grandmothers. “And it’s about how they use the lie to control and change their lives.”

“The lie” is at the heart of “Since Otar Left ... .” The plot begins simply enough: For Eka, the grandmother played by Esther Gorintin (a splendid actress who began her career at age 85), the sun all but rises and sets on the letters and phone calls she receives from Otar, a doctor now working odd construction jobs in Paris. Daughter Marina (Nino Khomassouridze) resents her mother’s favoritism, and they bicker. Outside the home, Marina struggles to survive selling goods in the flea market, despite her university education. Her husband was killed in Afghanistan; the man she now keeps company with is good for sex, she says, but not for conversation at dinner.

Granddaughter Ada (Dinara Droukarova), in her early 20s, plays peacemaker between the two women and longs to leave Tbilisi. In the evenings she reads Proust to her grandmother, who prefers her command of the French language to Marina’s. By day Ada tries to negotiate the new world of capitalism and tolerates a boyfriend who talks of a BMW filled with cash but takes her to the hills above the city for sex in an old Soviet Lada.

And, when word comes that Otar has been killed in an accident, Ada agrees to participate in the ruse her mother devises to keep the news from Eka. They compose and read to Eka letters that speak of Otar’s new life in Paris, where he’s meeting poets and painters in cafes and attending the opera, featuring, of course, “Boris Gudonov.” It is a ruse that ultimately allows each of them, with varying degrees of success, to rise above a difficult social and familial reality.

“My family was my two grandmothers, my mother and me,” said Bertuccelli. Her father is director Jean-Louis Bertuccelli (“Ramparts of Clay”); her parents split when she was small. “Both grandmothers had more love for their sons than for their daughters. But these women didn’t give a man a right place. They put the man on a pedestal. Or, like in the film, Marina doesn’t like the boyfriend; he’s good for bed, not for speaking.”

Eka, she added, is a combination of both grandmothers. “They were completely different. My mother’s mother was quite aristocratic and beautiful, she was from the intelligentsia. She was like the queen of the family.” Her father’s mother, who had married an Italian and lived “the immigrant life in the South of France” was “very popular, very generous, and she had the physique of Esther Gorintin,” who is stocky, with a large, open face and expressive features.

“Eka is a woman who has a lot of character, a lot of energy,” said Gorintin, speaking by phone from Paris. Gorintin, 91, was born in Poland, immigrated to France before World War II and worked for many years as a dental assistant to her husband. Now a widow with a son and two grandchildren, she began acting after answering a call from director Emmanuel Finkiel for “Voyages,” a film in which she played a Russian woman searching for a distant cousin in Israel.

Speaking about Eka, she said, “I was fascinated by this woman. She was a witness to a lot of changes. She doesn’t let sadness beat her down. There’s a lot of love in that family, in spite of what goes on between her and her daughter.”

Khomassouridze, who plays Marina, said Marina lies about Otar because “she doesn’t want her mother to suffer.” The film, she added, speaking by phone from Tbilisi, accurately depicts “Georgia as it is now.” The power goes out frequently, the phone goes dead in the middle of a call, people of Marina’s generation are unable to find work, the elderly long for the order of the Soviet regime, the young want to leave. But Georgians are also known for their appreciation of the finer things in life, of French culture, of fine wines and hospitality.

“Julie loved Georgia very much, she’s been here several times,” said Khomassouridze. “There is a lot of beauty, a lot of flowers for instance, in this film.”

But the film is not confined to the realities of Georgia. At its center are “very common experiences,” said Jean-Michel Frodon, a critic and director of Cahiers du Cinema. “It deals with the question of absence, of distance, of belonging to a certain space. One way or another we all have parents and children and missing persons in our lives. The film is not intellectual; you can enter it very easily. Once you’re inside, you have to deal with your own ghosts.”

For Bertuccelli -- who worked as an assistant to Krzysztof Kieslowski and Otar Iosseliani, has made documentaries and is the mother of two young children (their father is her director of photography, Christophe Pollack) -- the most personal aspect of the film is perhaps her resemblance to Ada.

“I was often making peace between my grandmother and my mother,” she said. “At the beginning of the film, Ada has no room for her personality. My own mother is beautiful, she has a lot of energy, she always wants to do big projects. She used to put together art exhibits, great exhibitions, but always at the last minute. My grandmother and I would criticize her, like Eka and Ada do in the film. I was born in 1968. She was a great mother, but much too open. At 14 I had nothing to rebel against. Like Ada, I had my adolescent crisis in my 20s. The story of the film is the story of Ada learning to be a woman and to be egotistical, but egotistical in a good way. She learns to say no” -- to her grandmother, to her mother, to the dictates of life in post-Soviet Tbilisi -- “through this lie.”

When Gorintin, who’s drawn critical praise with her acting in both “Voyages” and “Otar,” first read the role of Eka, she was “a little concerned because it seemed like a role for a real actress,” she said. But since the film’s release in Paris, “people come up to me and say, ‘Madam, isn’t that you in the film?’ That pleases me, and I don’t hide it.”

And what does her family think of her new career? “They were very surprised,” she said, her tone warm with the memory. “They went with me to the film, and they saw me. I waited until it was a fait accompli. I never told them in advance.”