In Rusudan Glurjidze‘s weathered, wintry sophomore feature “The Antique,” the title could refer to any number of withering relics: the handsome, richly patinaed items of furniture that Georgian immigrant Medea (Salome Demuria) illegally imports from her homeland to Russia to sell; the once-grand but disintegrating Saint Petersburg apartment that she buys at a reduced price, on a peculiar condition; or Vadim (the late Sergey Dreyden), the apartment’s elderly, crotchety former owner, who insists on living there even after the deeds have been transferred. Or it could just be Russia itself, a venerable state resistant to an evolving population, captured here in the midst of an aggressive 2006 drive to expel or eliminate thousands of settled ethnic Georgians.
Glurijidze’s film sometimes hardens and freezes with lingering anger over that injustice, but that’s beneath the warmer veneer of a genial culture-clash tale, in which ostensibly opposed characters recognize in each other a common degree of damage: Everything and everyone is a bit shopworn in “The Antique,” which isn’t shy about stretching an elegiac metaphor. Like the director’s exquisite 2016 debut “House of Others” — likewise chosen as Georgia’s international Oscar submission — her second feature is a melancholic, atmospheric and ravishingly shot slice of recent history, funnelling wider social and political crises through more intimately drawn character conflicts.
If “The Antique” doesn’t quite have the haunted, bone-deep impact of its predecessor, its gently tempered sentimentality may carry it further on the global arthouse circuit following a festival run that got off to a difficult start. Initially pulled at the last minute from its Venice premiere slot, due to an alleged copyright dispute that the filmmakers declared an attempt at Russian censorship, the film eventually had a belated bow on the Lido — now boasting battle scars that may lend additional currency to its stand against Georgian oppression in Putin’s Russia.
Played by Demuria with a flinty, closely guarded air of self-containment, Medea is a brisk pragmatist who, like many of her compatriots, has left Georgia for economic reasons — and is no great hurry to form human connections in Saint Petersburg, the elegant but icy streetscapes of which rather suit her non-convivial nature. Even at her job in a drafty antiques warehouse, she works in predominant isolation, taking orders from an unseen upstairs boss who communicates only by intercom. In this crystallized vision of mid-2000s Russia, it’s every man and woman for themselves — all the better to escape authoritarian notice. The surprisingly roomy period apartment that Medea buys at the film’s outset is a perfect refuge: Peeling, dilapidated and still cluttered with yellowing remnants of decades past, it’s a place for those who would be forgotten.
It comes with a catch, however. Octogenarian widower Vadim, a former government official, makes his continued tenancy in the apartment a condition of its sale, and who treats his new, young roommate with brusque contempt — a mixture of his own ornery misanthropy and ugly xenophobia inherited from the culture around him. Distance and distrust is the old man’s default position toward other people, while the youth curling matches he regularly attends as a spectator are the closest he comes to human contact.
Yet without much concession on either side, relations gradually thaw between these two apparent opposites, who are, if nothing else, mutually inclined toward solitude. Neither one can entirely remain an island, though Vadim veritably cultivates an estrangement from his stuffy, materialistic son Peter (Vladimir Vdovichenkov). Medea, meanwhile, can’t entirely reject the persistent advances of her Georgian ex Lado (Vladimir Daushvili), whose journey to Russia in pursuit of her lands him in the crosshairs of Russian deporters.
The slow softening of the film’s central, cross-cultural, cross-generational relationship could veer into maudlin territory if not for the gracefully restrained performances of Demuria and Dreyden — the latter in his final screen appearance before his death last year. There’s enough perverse, sometimes grimly funny particularity to their characterizations to complicate the allegorical leanings of the film’s script, written by the director with an anonymous collaborator, which etches micro-portraits of gaping human sadness in a larger panorama of mass tragedy. But the chief pleasures in “The Antique” are ones of time and place and temperature, all evoked through the misted lens of ace Spanish DP Gorka Gomez Andreu — an ASC Spotlight award winner for his work on “House of Others.” Once more layering the frame with oxidized textures redolent of water damage and mirror rot, his exacting compositions suggest a pained present becoming shameful history before the very eyes of its participants.
