Critics reviews

The story is similar to Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) in the way the girls' interpersonal drama is conflated with a fractured political system. Directors Nana Ekvtimshvili and Simon Gross adopt the long, contemplative takes of the new wave; much of the film feels familiar, but the location shooting and period details are nicely drawn, a result of Ekvtimshvili's autobiographical script.

Natia's incandescent courage, Eka's quiet self-reliance, and both girls' fierce loyalty and love for each other keeps a flickering ray of hope alive in this ferociously well-acted story of life in the struggling post-Soviet republic.

The filmmakers make resourceful use of lively ensemble stagings and fluid long takes to give their modestly-sized production an epic sweep and energy, centered on a class of vivacious free-roaming girls who embody all the promise of Georgia's newly earned independence, one that quickly spirals into tragic fractiousness and violence.

Miraculous performances from the young actors bolster the subtle sense of impending tragedy, not least due to the amusing counterpoint between brash and caustic Natia and the much more reserved and pensive Eke... The explosive climax of the film does offer a heavy-handed hint at the hostilities to come, but also — in the spirit of its lead characters –—refuses to bow to boring convention.

The childhood innocence in the eyes of Babluani and Bokeria melts away as they're forced to make terrible choices, the bubble of girlhood punctured by huge social forces. The movie never, ever makes a wrong move, and many sequences are as good as anything in recent cinema.

In Bloom is the kind of film that would once have been deemed "Neorealist," then "kitchen sink," and most recently "miserabilist," though rarely accurately. Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross's coming-of-age film, Georgia's entry for this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar, is less an indulgence in despair than it is a calculated accumulation of horrors designed to show violence percolating through a society. That makes it sound kind of wan and unpleasant, but it's also electrifyingly well made.

Where the two directors, Georgia's Nana Ekvtimishvili and Germany's Simon Gross, excel most is in the performances they capture from the two leads. Both girls are jittery, impulsive bundles of emotion, jerking back and forth between childhood and maturity. At a wedding, Babluani performs a traditional dance and seems to be gaining a woman's assurance with each gesture.

In Bloom so triumphantly, albeit modestly, transcends its category that it's really quite special... Across the board, the film is terrifically cast, and there's a lovely balance between poetic contemplativeness and a ferocious adolescent energy that keeps threatening to burst its bounds. Vin ordinaire, maybe, but a delicious and unfamiliar vintage.

In Bloom is quietly observational, for the most part—an expert character study rooted in a very specific time and place, equally conversant with the chaos of daily bread lines and the boredom of unsupervised teen girls. (It's also savvy enough to have its kids listening to credible music, like the now-forgotten Phil Collins track "Heat On The Street.")

In Bloom renders its every adult bitter and ineffectual, complaining incessantly but never heard; the children, meanwhile, carry on defiantly, even insolently, revolting against schoolmasters, stealing from parents. The site of the action, the pummeled landscape of revolution and war, isn't incidental — it's what their generation has inherited, alongside disorder and dissent.

Girls become women as the nation of Georgia awkwardly tries on its own independence in this sluggish period piece, set in post-Soviet 1992 and alternating earnest emotions and a stunted plot. The right audience for In Bloom will recognize (and maybe even have nostalgia for) these tight family quarters and urgent radio broadcasts. Then again, anyone should be able to relate to the dramatic impact of breadlines turned violent...

The claustrophobic interiors of apartments and houses might be stages for anguished personal drama, but the streets of the city are something else. With their winding alleys and shadowy tunnels, a simple walk from one place to another seems fraught with peril. Ekvtimishvili and Groß craft the film with a long-take realism that both conveys a sense of the rhythm of everyday life while also ratcheting the tension in situations from which there's little escape.