Holy Electricity

Original title: Tsminda Elektroenergia

Directed by: Tato Kotetishvili

Country: Georgia

Length: 95 min.

Year: 2024

Premiere: Locarno Film Festival 2024 

GOLDEN LEOPARD - BEST FILM "CINEASTI DEL PRESENTE" SECTION

Synopsis: Bart and Gonga scour through the outskirts of Tbilisi, selling neon crosses and hoping for a better life.

RATING 3.5/5

REVIEW

he first impressions of cinematographer Tato Kotetishvili's debut feature are documentaristic. With non-professional lead actors and ad-libs lines, the dominance of presumably untamed locations, the virtual abscence of an overarching storyline, Holy Electricity has the raw energy of documentary cinema. It is a work in which fiction is very much subservient to the form.

Yet, the subject is very much fictional, centered on Bart and Gonga, two cousins that sell neon crosses and wander through Tbilisi. The episodic journey of the two characters leads to interactions with a whole series of peculiar characters, each representative of this unique reality, with Bart's transgender identity serving as a device to shed some light on the lgbt community of the georgian capital. In scenes that echo the gestuals of Parajanov transposed in the queer poverty of Jakubiško, Holy Electricity feels aesthetically rich and distinctive, even if it could result repulsive in its kitsch aesthetic of poverty.

As a work of fiction, the film is definitely what could be defined "plot-driven", even if events happen and there are consequentialities to performed actions and scenes. This is mostly due to the form, again: the very documentaristic feel makes it very hard to engage with the film's plot, it's much easier to absorb Holy Electricity as a cascade of interactions loosely tied together by a story.

While this is detrimental to the fruition as a work of fiction, it does highlight the merit of Tato Kotetishvili of artificially constructing an environment that is so documentaristic as to feel real, something a work of fiction cannot achieve easily. The docu-fictional dimension is certainly nothing unheard of, but Kotetishvili's feature goes to an extent that few contemporary films achieved, even less debuts.

The thematic density in representing the outskirts of Tbilisi is certainly vast: the metaphor of the neon cross does capture the chimeric hybrid condition of the protagonists and most of the other people portrayed, living in a lowly condition and longing for the most elevated form of grace - be it divine or Bart and Gonga's aspirations of success. It is also an embodiment of consumerism, of that kitsch that dominates the visual aesthetic so much.

Holy Electricity is not a work of escapism from reality but rather a film in which reality creeps in, and does so perhaps too much at times.