Repentance (Monanieba) - Tengiz Abuladze

If you must tell someone about a film, then perhaps say something original? No tedious 'saying of the plot'?

Two things. Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance (Monanieba) plays with conventions doesn't it? It plays with the conventions of the presentation of self surely; and it plays with the conventions of role behaviour. Policemen (?) who present themselves as knights-in-armour; bodyguards (?) who present themselves as operatic singers. The local tyrant who pays you a visit and sings opera at you. Playing around with conventions is usually the prerogative of comedians. This is different. This is done for a surreal effect, a chord which is far more tricky to get right isn't it. And does Repentance indeed succeed in getting it right?

The conventions of role behaviour. Bodyguards who accompany their boss into the house of an artist do not usually wander around and peer at the paintings on the wall do they. The conventional form for a visiting town mayor is not to stand in one's front-room and show off one's operatic singing-voice is it. All anachronism aside, a legal official sitting in a live court does not usually work away at his Rubik's Cube. Corpses do not, in the conventional run of things, expect to be arrested. Local tyrants do not conventionally pay a surprise visit, extend an arm to shake hands then spike the gesture with a pratfall; nor do they conventionally ask their bodyguard whether he has a mother or not. And so it goes on in Repentance.

Conventions are subverted for the surreal. And secondly - has it been established in the literature yet that tyrants are frequently bad at relating 'one to one'? Rather, don't they seek connections that are 'one' to 'many'? For people like Varlam in Repentance this is the difference between situations where others can say words back, and situations where others cannot (for they are an audience). Won't 'words back' always trouble Varlam's sort of power? Varlam on that balcony can entrance a crowd; he can marshall The Great Wall Of China, and Confucius with his dark room and the black cat that is not there. But Varlam in front of a man who can say words back? There are good writers working on Repentance. They have Varlam acceding to a request for an audience. Three of the townsfolk wish to complain about the research centre being housed in the church, and Varlam is confronted by individuals, right in front of him, who are not an audience, who can say words back. He starts off well. He can understand a grievance, there is an effective exchange of ideas - then his one-to-one communication turns a bit mad doesn't it. He impulsively destroys the order to speed up a solution to this research centre problem; then apropos of nothing at all he talks of personal ancestry (he finds out that he and the artist share an ancestor) and after that he expounds on 'life'. In Varlam-world at some point music has to be switched-on, unseen, and after a suitable musical tone has been quickly struck, his female assistant has to announce that the 'audience is over now'.

Later on in the unfolding events of Repentance he pays a surprise visit to the artist's house. It becomes clear that in other one-to-one communications also (social calls this time, rather than the granted audiences we have already seen) he runs things equally bizarrely and equally ineffectively but in a different manner. He utters little speeches rather than conversations. He stuns people into long silences by taking prompts from what is around him or from planned dramas, and he delivers little speeches on the type of painting a state needs, on the obligation on all intellectuals to enlighten the people . . . and he steadies himself for an airing of his operatic singing voice. Do men and women who want power have a facility for thinking in speeches and in stunts as Varlam does in Repentance, and do they also possess a dull inadequacy when faced with an interesting individual mind? Not all of them of course.