Kritiken

This aspect of Ekvtimshvili's screenplay is particularly well-pitched: a middle aged woman must have a concrete reason for wanting to leave her family. Manana doesn't have one, and this is what unnerves people most. . . . In other words, her decision to live alone is never painted as a decision to abandon her role as a mother and a daughter. The appeal of Manana as a character and of My Happy Family as a film is that a woman can be both independent and dependable.

The lightness of touch allows plentiful moments of black humor to break through during even the family's most explosive fights. Manana's mother, Lamara, whose melodramatic posturing outsizes her frail frame, is a particular delight. My Happy Family abounds in accomplished long takes, which capture the fullness of relative newcomer Shugliashvili's performance as Manana: the camera adeptly tracks Manana through family gatherings, mapping her family home as a heavily subjective space.

The urgency and tension of each scene emerges organically. I was also mesmerized by the intimate detail with which this world was rendered — everything from the particular way a cheese seller holds out her hands while giving an old friend a hug, to the subtle ways that men and women reorganize themselves when in large groups. There isn't a single second that doesn't ring as achingly true.

The muted colour palette and Tudor Vladimir Panduru's handheld long-takes reiterate a commitment to social realism Nana & Simon first made with In Bloom. In spite of this, My Happy Family relishes its sensory pleasures... The first time we see Manana really smile is in a market, as she peruses colourful stalls of fresh produce. Where once the market was a chore, a stop on her mother's shopping list, now it's rendered anew, and Manana finds herself free from an imposed culinary order.

It is the kind of well-crafted film that the Competition could use, the kind of German-European Zusammenarbeit one might think the programmers would foreground after Toni Erdmann rejuvenated the international reception of German cinema at A-list rival Cannes in 2016. But more than that, it is a film that stays in the eyes and ears because it _believes_ in its own method, because it _trusts_ its characters and spectators.

A female liberation story set in Tbilisi, Georgia, and in a sardonically funny, touching key, "My Happy Family" follows Manana as she leaves her shocked family without explanation, shutting the door on a claustrophobic whirlwind of jostling bodies, hectoring voices and competing needs... The Georgian directors Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross could choreograph a ballet, but, lucky us, they're filmmakers.

Shugliashvili shrewdly conveys Manana's sense of emotional exhaustion and rejuvenated spirit as the character remains steadfast in her decision to live alone despite still visiting her family quite often. While the story of her past remains elusive, the film offers subtle details that paint an impressionistic portrait of the life Manana wishes to escape.

Nana and Simon's first feature, In Bloom, was a coming-of-age drama about two teenage girls in the conflict-torn Georgia of the early '90s. My Happy Family is arguably less ambitious in scope and theme, but it's a mature, finely modulated drama that invites the viewer into an intimate, vibrant family nest—and then shows you why the mother of that family would choose not to stay there.

There's palpable discontent, but also joy and profound beauty. (If this film is anything to go by, apparently all Georgians are marvelous singers.) "I survived the Communists… I survived so many shitty governments," says Otar, Manana's taciturn father. But family is something else altogether. This is a film that both understands that, and communicates it well.

The famous George Burns quote that "Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city" is literally put into practice by the heroine of Georgian directors Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross' perceptive and endearing second feature, about a 52-year-old mother who changes her life by moving out of the house. It's a simple, somewhat mundane scenario that, in the hands of a terrific cast and two talented filmmakers, is transformed into a minor Greek comic-tragedy.

Providing certain vivid detail but rather lacking in vitality, Ekvtimishvili's screenplay is stronger on sociology than drama. While she notably contrasts the relationship and lives of three generations of Georgian women, she and editor Stefan Stabenow allow dramatic events such as Manana's actual divorce and the breakup of Nino and Vakho's relationship to take place off-screen, robbing the overall action of the dynamism of climatic situations.

Nana & Simon (as they've helpfully/pragmatically chosen to be billed) operate in a familiar post-Dardennes/Romanian New Wave vein, using handheld camera in often inelegant spaces; it's the type of naturalism that, at this rate, has a ceiling on the amount of enthusiasm I can master, but they're extremely deft practitioners. The takes are often long and clearly meticulously choreographed, but rarely conspicuously so.