Review | Dead Souls’ Vacation — a tragicomic documentary about maternal love

★★★★☆

Keko Chelidze’s 2020 documentary gently and considerately explores the unusual relationship between a Georgian mother and her musician son.

It must be very exciting, as a documentary maker — to train your camera somewhere, on some person, community, or phenomenon, with an idea of the story that will emerge, only to watch that story morph into something else entirely. Presumably this is a common occurrence — the truth of your subject is rarely visible at first glance.

So it was for Dead Souls’ Vacation. Chelidze first saw the story as a chronicle of a once-successful musician’s attempts to reforge his career. Levan Svanidze, the film’s protagonist, was an in-demand bass guitar player in the 1990s, at the forefront of Tbilisi’s alternative music scene. He was unable to sustain his career, however, and in the decades that followed he all but disappeared from the public eye.

But while his struggles as a musician do structure the documentary, its real subject is the relationship between Levan and his mother. As Chelidze said, ‘when we stepped inside Levan’s home and began shooting, it became obvious that much of his life had been determined by his unusual relationship with his mother, which eventually became my film’s main theme’.

The film opens with Levan attempting to get work at the Georgian Public Broadcaster. The screen is dark, we hear him being rebuffed by a suspicious receptionist. He sounds tipsy. The footage begins, and we watch a rangy, balding man sit down next to a homeless woman. She’s surrounded by sacks, too many to carry, stuffed with rags. Levan commiserates with her. There’s not much that divides them, he says — neither of them have an income. She ignores him.

With the guileless amiability of the child or the drunk, Levan walks the streets around the Public Broadcaster’s building, chewing the fat with beggars and street vendors. We get a singular drone shot, the only one in the film, rising far above Levan’s head at some grubby intersection of the city. It’s effective cinematography; his bald head looks vulnerable from up there.

Levan and his mother, Lamara, share a 14 square metre apartment in a run-down Tbilisi suburb, along with their half-blind cat. Much of the documentary takes place inside this tiny apartment, Levan at the little dining table pouring shots of peach vodka from a plastic water bottle, Lamara sat or supine on the sofa wrapped in blankets, reciting poetry or issuing commentary on their perpetually blabbering television.

Intermittently Levan leaves the apartment to pass out his CDs in bars and restaurants, hoping to secure live music gigs, or to practice with his band, Cerili, where Levan has been playing bass since 1995. The moment he leaves, Lamara begins to bombard him with telephone calls. She seems to get physically unwell as soon as she is left alone, so Levan is driven to distraction running backwards and forwards across the city.

At home they’re constantly biting at each others’ ankles. It’s never totally clarified, but Lamara seems to have lost both a husband and a son. Whenever Levan leaves, she sits and stares at their photographs and works herself up into a state — at one point even suffering a heart attack. There are regular flares of anger and frustration, but there are also moments of extraordinary tenderness between them: Levan, drunk, ineffectively dying the roots of his mother’s hair; the two of them slow-dancing in the square metre of empty floor space they share; finishing bowls of lobio (beans) and harmonising to old-time Georgian love songs.

Yet there is also a real madness in that apartment, the madness of two isolated people, talking in circles, talking for the sake of talking. It feels like Grey Gardens, or Waiting for Godot. They seem basically detached from reality, in a way both tragic and funny. ‘When this country becomes stable’, Lamara tells Levan, ‘I’ll approach the minister with your music’. ‘Which minister?, Levan asks. ‘The Minister of Agriculture?’.

It’s difficult to translate, but it’s clear their dialogue is full of that kind of intra-familial linguistic innovation, made-up words and phrases arising from constant proximity. Chelidze said, ‘during shooting, we became part of the family and on some days we even catch ourselves referring to the jokes and expressions of our protagonists’.

In general, Levan approaches his circumstances — those of an unmarried man in his forties, with teeth and a career that have both seen better days, utterly absorbed in an oppressive relationship with his neurotic mother — admirably, with a kind of exasperated humour. When Lamara calls him for the twentieth time, he tells her, ‘Mum, I’ll be home in twelve minutes and forty-seven seconds, okay?’.

As such, the mechanics of co-dependence are writ large in Dead Souls’ Vacation. Fundamentally, neither Levan nor Lamara want anything about their life or their relationship to change. They fear change more than anything else. Ostensibly, Lamara wants Levan to get married, but she guilt-trips him into cancelling dates with other women. Ostensibly, Levan wants to restart his music career, but he crashes out and misses his band’s long-awaited gig. He effectively says that he’ll commit suicide when Lamara passes away, and so he wants her to live just one more decade, just long enough for him to ‘create something’. You couldn’t call it optimism, but there’s a kind of amor fati to Levan’s outlook, from whence the humour surely stems.

One of the producers of Dead Souls’ Vacation, Kote Kalandadze, was an erstwhile bandmate of Levan’s in the 1990s, in an alternative group called Amorali. They’re still good friends, and Levan has made a couple of cameos in other films by Kalandadze, ‘just the way he is: a little drunk, amusing and lighthearted’. Kalandadze’s friendship with Levan is probably partially responsible for the latter’s frankness in front of the camera.

Truly, it’s a fascinating film, claustrophobic and sad, but full of redemptive humour.