Dry Leaf

Bluesky

Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze stylistically picks up from his earlier feature Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), capturing his native country in low-resolution phone camera footage. Over the course of three hours, the audience follows protagonist Irakli as he looks for his estranged daughter Lisa, a photographer who went missing on her quest to visit football pitches across Georgia. The loose narrative premise gives rise to enchanting, dreamlike images of rural areas, where surreal things happen without surprising anyone.

Played by the director's own father, Irakli seems to possess the ability of seeing what is invisible on the screen. He takes with him his friend Levan, perceived only through a voice-over of him speaking. In somewhat bizarre scenes, Irakli shakes hands with the air around him and remains alone in the car, even though the camera treats the space within the frame as if another person were indeed there. Similarly, as he travels around, Irakli interacts with locals who are only ever heard, but not seen. There might also be something innate about Georgian landscapes themselves that Irakli is able to see and understand while the audience cannot; nothing fazes him during his meandering search, and he seems capable of even enjoying the journey despite repeatedly failing to track down his daughter.

Paradoxically, the world of Dry Leaf is one of peace and harmony. The blurry, hazy images recorded entirely on a discontinued Sony Ericsson cellphone – frequently in long takes – make it a hardly digestible slow cinema challenge, yet rewarding as an aesthetic experience. The immaculate score by the director's brother Giorgi Koberidze enriches the poetic visuals of the impending autumn season. There is a repeated emphasis on the presence of animals, plants and nature's own life cycle, which this regular man cannot impose himself on. Introduced through Irakli's first-person account, and only much later shaped by the perspective of another character, the narrative unravels in two small bursts, with plenty of time in between for one to simply observe and reflect on the unusual storytelling style.

Playing with repetition, mingy disclosure of information and circularity, Koberidze turns his protagonist into something of the hero of a road movie but with a twist: the chronotope the journey is built on provokes the audience into reconsidering their habitual ways of seeing and understanding. It is a significant departure from his previous What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), which it nevertheless matches in its openness to wonder, magic, and absurdity. Despite the use of an actual dry leaf as the film's leitmotif, the title may just as well allude to the football free-kick technique that sends the ball veering unpredictably – much like Irakli and his daughter's story meanders here, and life so often does beyond the screen. For the discerning and patient viewer, this game has a lot to offer. Everyone else, and especially those wary of old tropes, may feel they have been taken for a ride.

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