During Sofia Film Festival, I've found particularly useful the meeting with directors after a screening. On this occasion, Ovashvili was quick to inform the audience that he's a Scorpio and he isn't one for talking; furthermore, he needs to die in order to be reborn, hence the film. His previous films had been essentially devoid of dialogue, but for this one he needed to come out of a crisis. When asked if it helped, said, "no, it made me even angrier".
The film follows a director/scriptwriter "living in his own world" who's plagued by an inability to communicate, at the same time longing for a relationship and "love", and intent to commit suicide should it be an illusion. His wife is irate at the situation and wants to "just be left alone". There's a hint the director had previously employed an assistant with whom he's had an affair.
The film begins with a girl, Helen, who's returning from America to find something home, something which she cannot articulate and denies an idea of motherland. She is no beauty in a conventional way, and she resists a universal notion of love, instead being rational, making various interesting points throughout, embodying the very idea of dialogue and philosophy ("life is philosophy or the other way round, I'm not sure"). It is through her chance encounter that the Artist hopes to find meaning, so he takes her on as his next assistant, much to the frustration of the wife.
In a way, this is a "road" film, with the duo looking for "locations". On a crucial stop they meet a ghoulish figure talking of a ghost, both sharing names with our heroine and the hero, who's looking "not for a canyon but a bridge, although I also want to see the canyons". "Sometimes the building stones are more interesting than the wall": in this soul-excavation, he faces himself in a challenge to his sanity. A mirror scene depicts near-lunacy, while a mirror of Helen had previously conveyed her romantic grief and sadness, contrary to her usual poise. She is as impenetrable to the protagonist (Gabriel/Gabo) as he is to his wife; denying even being construed as an enigma and an object of affection, as we witness in a scene with an interested young male. And learn through her story iof having abandoned a previous one, "although he was in love with me and I also loved him in my own way". Helen is alluring in being unavailable. Gabo suggests that love is when two people need to be together, while Helen says that people need each other occasionally, and by far not all the time.
In a way they're both "Scorpio": one the eternal sceptic, and the other the angry romantic in search of relationship/love which he at the same time resists, preferring self-sabotage. Ultimately "Beautiful Helen" is the imaginary ideal he uses to escape the wife who truly loves him; the abandoned wife unleashes on unsuspected Helen who's lured Gabo by being a distant blank canvas for his self-projection. He'll let her go, as well; and when asked "what will become of Helen", replies that she'll take on her own route.
"I got confused, the audience will too.", Helen says in this picture which ostensibly mystifies. Perhaps this esoteric director has fancied the Upanishads, "we are like the dreamer who weaves his dream and then lives inside it; we are the Creator who makes the creation and then enters it". I suggested to him that "there is no Other" (Advaita Vedanta), but he sort of ironised me, asking "is that a question", and ending the meeting by saying that he cannot fathom what ever questions an audience could ask about his film.
