Elene Naveriani | Wet Sand / 2021

a cremation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sandro Naveriani and Elene Naveriani (screenplay), Elene Naveriani (director) Wet Sand / 2021

 

The Georgian film Wet Sand begins as a kind of multi-genre murder-mystery that gradually unfolds itself to become a developing lesbian love story and, finally, a tale of a 20-year-old hidden love between two local middle-aged gay men. This version of Peyton Place occurs in a small Georgian Black Sea tourist town during the off-tourist season, a rather bleak time when the locals have lots of free time on their hands to gossip and complain about their so-called beloved neighbors.

     The “neighbor” is all the townspeople agree is the least loved is Eliko (Tengo Javakhadze), mostly because he is wealthy and keeps his distance from the other townsfolk, enjoying expensive wines, listening to music, and basically representing himself, as they would describe, as better than them—without any of them bothering to consider that he might truly be more open minded, a fuller human being.

      The film begins with writing a letter which he carefully wraps around a bottle of wine before wrapping the bottle, in turn, in brown paper and tying it up with a ribbon, clearly intended as a gift. His actions are almost interrupted as a guest arrives.

      Soon after, Eliko’s body is found hanged—a suicide all proclaim since it was well known he was suffering from cancer and in great pain.

      None of the self-anointed good citizens who daily meet up at Amnon’s (Gia Agumava) restaurant and bar, Wet Sand—the only one in the village—want anything to do with Eliko’s burial and have no idea of how they might notify anyone else in the family. Listening to them Amnon attempts to argue some good sense into their heads: how can they leave one of their own townspeople unburied in they are all such caring beings? He’ll take care of the burial, he announces, and he has heard that Eliko has a granddaughter, * Moe (Bebe Sesitashvili) living in the capitol city of Tilbisi. He’ll look around to see if he still has her number which inexplicably, he explains, Eliko once shared with him.

      Moe arrives late by bus, with Amnon asleep on the bus bench by the time she reaches the village. He takes her to Eliko’s home, inquiring after her mother, who once lived in the village. Moe announces she is dead of cancer. And later, seeking something to eat and drink, Moe visits the bar where she meets the bar-keep, Amnon’s daughter Fleshka (Megi Kobaladze).

      Fleshka, much like Moe’s father is terrible unhappy in the small town and has been looking for some while to sell her house and move to the city. She and Moe immediately hit it off, both attempting to “read” one another, although clearly feeling just from the look of the other, a lesbian attraction. The script and the director, however, go out of their way to keep that aspect of the story, a least for a while, deeply buried, in fact, suggesting that it’s possible that the outsider Moe is more interested in the handsome young police officer in charge of investigating her father’s death, Alex (Giorgi Tsereteli), which even Alex seems convinced of throughout much of the film, until Moe makes it clear that her love is for Fleshka.

      To the townspeople, Moe, with her short, dyed hair, her trendy clothes, and her rings, seems as much an outsider as her grandfather; and it is clear that they take an immediate disliking to her, as she does to them. One local, an old sailor friend of Amnon’s even remembers her visiting the village as a child, but she has no memories of it, holding hostilities infused perhaps by her own mother’s feelings and clearly those of her grandfather.

     She also begins to quickly discover that her grandfather’s life and death is not a simple as she might have first suspected. One aspect of the film’s mystery is resolved—far too quickly and conveniently for my taste—when Moe accidentally comes upon Amnon as he is saying goodbye to Eliko’s corpse. He speaks of their relationship (later admitting to her that they have been a devoted couple for 20-some years) and plants a kiss on his lost lover’s lips.

     Meanwhile, Amnon, Fleshka, and Moe are hardly able to even find someone to dig Eliko’s grave, let alone attend the ceremony. And when they do attempt to buy him, it is clear the workers did not dig it to normal size.

     Fleshka’s and Moe’s love, moreover, heats up, but we also recognize Moe is afraid of committing herself because of her intended return to the city.

     Things become even more complex when Alex reports that, in fact, Eliko was not suffering from cancer at the time of his death, and was in fact in good health. Even Amnon now feels as if Eliko has lied to him, he being obviously the man who arrived to help Eliko commit suicide, imagining that he was helping him relieve the unbearable pain he was suffering.

     It is only when Amnon unwraps the present of the wine, and reads his dead lover’s letter that he realizes Eliko could no longer bear having to keep the secret from the hostile natives of their town, and now invites Amnon to join him by drinking the wine infused with poison.

     The women find Amnon dead and determine to bury him next to Eliko. But almost before they can even contemplate how to achieve it, they discover that the townspeople, who have heard the latest rumors and jumped to their conclusions, refuse Amnon room in their cemetery. In the meantime, they have dug up Eliko’s body and tossed it into the swamp.

     Fleshka retrieves Eliko’s body and placing it beside Amnon’s in the upstairs bedroom of the Wet Sand bar, they wait for word to get out. Late at the night the angry townspeople led by Dato, pour gasoline over all the roof of their only dining spot and set it on fire, thus cremating the men together, the burial decision the women have come to in order to resolve the problems they face.

     In a sense, the real murderers of both Eliko and Amnon, the townspeople, now, unwittingly, become the ones who ritualistically send their bodies into the heavens.

     In the last scene, we see Moe serving up beer and food in a garden outside Fleshka’s house, while, just as in the first scene of the film, Fleshka brings in wood she has gathered on the beach to stoke their stove. The small house has become the new Wet Sand, a new generation, this time openly displaying their love, offering the community its only gathering and socializing spot. And presumably Eliko’s home, inherited by Moe, has now become the couple’s home. Certainly, it longer does the village idlers any good to gossip about what everyone knows. Perhaps they will have to turn their attention, instead, to how Dato beats his wife, and gripe about how the other of the patriarchs has lost their power over this self-righteous Black Sea resort.

       

*She is described as Eliko’s granddaughter by all the critics and in the media reports, but since Eliko appears to be at the most in his 60s when he dies, Amnon is in his 50s, and Moe and Fleska seem about the same age, both in their 20s; Moe, I suggest, might as well be his daughter, not granddaughter. But I’d have to see the film again to better unravel that information.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).