“When you’re not driving yourself, you don’t really remember the route,” Levan, the travel companion of Irakli (David Koberidze), says from the passenger seat in “Dry Leaf” as the two make their way across their native country of Georgia. He could be referring to his own memory, which appears to be fallible as he can only vaguely remember all the soccer fields he visited with Irakli’s daughter Lisa, a sports photographer who embarked a project where the football fields revealed something about the communities they resided in, but when Irakli seeks to retrace her footsteps after receiving a troubling farewell letter, he can be as confused by the road behind him as the one ahead that he hasn’t yet traveled and has to come to terms with the fact that perhaps all this time he hasn’t been in the driver’s seat at all.
Being merely along for the ride may have unsettling implications for Irakli, but it is as much a pleasure for an audience in Alexandre Koberidze’s third feature, as it was in his last, the international breakthrough “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?” which followed two soulmates prevented from ever actually meeting, leading to a walkabout that allowed for the simple pleasures of being in and around nature to come to the fore. With simple loglines and a proclivity for three-hour plus runtimes (his latest feature is his shortest at just a hair over three), there’s reason to suspect that the writer/director could flirt with tedium, but while the work could be accurately described as meandering, it is only in the best ways possible, redefining the term as much as recalibrating the senses to be better attuned to the world around you.
“Dry Leaf” is a slightly darker film than Koberidze’s previous adventure, both in spirit and aesthetic when like his debut feature “Let the Summer Never Come Again,” it is filmed on a Sony Ericsson W595 mobile phone rather than the more traditional movie camera deployed for “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?” to capture the springtime swoon of Georgia in all its glory. The dirt paths dotted with green grass and covered by grey skies that Irakli traverses are somehow no less beautiful, but the quality of the image rarely seen on a film of this scale since Michael Almereyda was working in Pixelvision has the ability to hide things in deep shadowy blacks the brighter the rest of the frame becomes, a fitting reflection of a father who is left in the dark about his daughter’s whereabouts. He and his wife Nino shouldn’t be all that concerned when Lisa, at 28, should be free to spread her wings, but having cut herself off so dramatically with a handwritten letter asking for her freedom, he can’t help but wonder what’s caused her to leave and whether she’s in her right mind.
Lisa’s disappearance holds mild intrigue for Koberidze, but after Irakli enlists Levan for his help to find her as the journalist who last accompanied her on her photo project, the film’s greater interest comes into focus as the director announces in his limited narration, now a signature in his films, that “Levan, like other people in this film’s reality, are invisible.” In fact, Levan only ever expresses himself in a disembodied voice throughout “Dry Leaf,” but his physical absence and specious memory is indicative of a growing collective amnesia around Georgia where Irakli, in his search for Lisa, comes to find all else that’s vanishing as time moves on and societies have different priorities than they once did. This isn’t so much of a lament for what was than an acknowledgement of how things are and it allows Irakli to appreciate what he can from moment to moment when conversations that start out asking for directions for the nearest soccer field lead to richer interactions about the area they’re standing in and the preoccupation of what’s immediately in front of Irakli is alleviated to see all the other life going on when he is often surrounded by a variety of other species from cats and dogs to cows and mules, all going about their own journeys but subtly reshaping the context around him.
Besides having his own father play Irakli, Koberidze involves his brother Giorgi for the film’s magnificent score, as organically wedded to the character’s curiosity and occasional melancholy as they are genetically connected, and “Dry Leaf” often plays with the power of a silent film, demonstrating what’s essential to remaining engaging doesn’t have to involve any technical advancement and even as it provides the joys of escapism, it movingly contends that being conscious of others’ experience is an integral part of our own.
“Dry Leaf” will screen again at the Locarno Film Festival on August 14th at 11:15 am at L’Altra Sala and August 15th at 9 pm at PalaCinema 1.