Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: MEDEA [International Film Festival Rotterdam 2022 - Virtual]
The tendencies of love or sometimes the absolute nature of it can place a path that is both deluded but also pure. "Medea" [P&I Selection] moves on certain themes of that original play but using the backgrounds of Russia and Israel while embracing and flipping relevant and deconstructed social constructs. The film really offers in Medea's journey an interesting protocol for how a person defines themselves. The construct of what Medea sees as her ideal lies in the connection of love while she herself drapes herself in desire as a wonton serpent looking for the next prize per se. Tinatin Dalakishvili plays Medea with a crispness but also a fragility. Her preciseness focuses in at a couple points where the would be succubus comes in but the fear of abandonment, almost as a vengeful Medusa, rests in both the love she carries but also the fear and tenderness that she brings in other scenes. While the initial background switch to the desert is abrupt, it does resolve itself. However, it is the first shift of emotion near the sea surrounded by old structures that show where the tragedy of the story may and does lie.
Medea roams the wasteland per se taking lovers while speaking of her ideal love (in not-so-many words)). Her children are her own...disconnected for her and yet essential but they seem like someone else's kids. The way she embraces desire and then almost dies at times from it is a unique perspective. Alexey (Evgeniy Tsyganov), her would-be husband and anchor to her mortality, is an interesting (if passive at times) figure because Medea's entire journey is based on perceptions of what she thinks he is. The movie has an interesting parallel to "Leviathan" from a couple years back and yet is much more surreal while maintaining an epic feel. Dalakishvili, in her physicality and reflexive mental state, ruminates on existence but her pinball approach to life seesaws back and forth, not in a normal narrative way but as a metaphor for her own primal scream that she fully embraces and comprehends. Her point is that she understands everyone but no one understands her. One suitor she interacts with speaks of a notion both in society, religion and existence of "intuitive intelligence". What is intriguing about "Medea" (both a a film but also as an interpretation is that it throws up masks of want and desire while at the same time realizing that its lead character is extremely powerful lacking in essence a tether and being disappointed in what it does or does not bring. B
By Tim Wassberg
