Review | Tesnota — a taut portrait of Jewish diaspora life in the North Caucasus

★★★★☆

This unsettling domestic drama is an admirable directorial debut from dissident Circassian director Kantemir Balagov.

Tesnota, or, Closeness, was director Kantemir Balagov’s 2017 feature film debut. Though it won the FIPRESCI Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of that year’s Cannes Film Festival, Balagov is better known for his subsequent film Beanpole (2019), a disturbing film set in Leningrad after World War II that was roundly praised and won him several more prizes.

As is typical of directorial debuts, Tesnota is a personal film, and was made on a shoestring budget. The narrative takes place in Nalchik, the capital of Kabarda–Balkaria, where Balagov was born in 1991.

Just under half of Nalchik’s population Circassian. They are mostly Muslim, and have a distinct language.

Balagov studied in Nalchik under the highly-regarded filmmaker Alexander Sokurov. In February 2022, Balagov condemned Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine and fled to California, where he now lives with his film-director girlfriend Kira Kovalenko (Sofichka, 2016).

Tesnota is a thriller, a family drama, and a coming-of-age film. It tracks the fallout of the kidnapping of a newly-engaged Jewish couple who are held for ransom by a group of Circassian (referred to as Kabardian in the film) men. Instead of following their experience as hostages, however, Balagov focuses instead on the effects their absence and the crippling ransom sum have on their family and on the wider Jewish community in Nalchik.

The protagonist Ilana (Darya Zhovner), whose brother is kidnapped, is a wayward tomboy who looks (and grimaces) uncannily like Kristen Stewart. She works in her father’s mechanic shop and has a Circassian boyfriend, much to her mother’s chagrin. We learn that antisemitism has kept Ilana’s family on the move around Russia, so Ilana’s adolescence was one of dislocation and disruption. Her relationship with her brother has a kind of vague and unconsummated incestuous intrigue.

The film opens with a set of steadicam shots from a car, driving through the streets of Nalchik at night. We see Soviet memorials, scruffy blocks of flats, and residents in raincoats lit up by the headlights. Unusually, we get an immediate directorial incursion, with some subtitles that introduce Balagov and his hometown, informing us that the events of the film really happened in 1998. This is not some intellectual gesture designed to break the fourth wall, but rather, according to Balagov, an ‘opportunity to show a moment of true sincerity to the audience’ and to provide necessary context to the story.

Balagov came under criticism for his insertion of some harrowing footage of the Tukhchar Massacre of 1999, showing the decapitation of Russian soldiers by Chechen and Daghestani militants during the War in Daghestan. In a word-salad to end all word-salads, Glenn Kenny of The New York Times wrote, ‘whatever [Balagov’s] ostensible point, its inclusion here is a deplorably truculent demonstration of directorial prerogative’.

Ilana, drinking beer and smoking a bong with her Circassian boyfriend and his friends, watches the grainy footage on a small television. It’s perversely difficult to look away, and Balagov shows his characters similarly transfixed. After the film’s release, Balagov said that he watched the footage as a teenager under identical circumstances. If one desires to justify its inclusion (and many viewers may be, fairly, too appalled to wish to do so) one should see it, again, not as an intellectual attempt to push boundaries or shock, but rather as a ‘moment of true sincerity’ — an experience that marked Balagov profoundly, and which informs the world of Tesnota in a crucial way.

Footage of that kind can be traumatising, and the viewer should be forewarned. But its insertion was not gratuitous — it demonstrates as nothing else could the historical nearness of trauma and violence in the region. It also elicits an important conflict between the characters, whose contrasting views illustrate the complexities of Circassian identity.

Interethnic tension between the Circassians, the Jews, and the Russians of Nalchik form the substructure of Tesnota. Balagov captures a bygone moment, before Perestroika and the mass-migration of Jews from Kabarda–Balkaria to the US, Israel, and Moscow. Balagov is clearly fascinated by the uneasy coexistence of Circassians and Jews, who share Russia as both a homeland and an enemy. He notes that Jews were hidden and protected by Circassians when German troops invaded the Caucasus in World War II, and that the Jewish community put down roots and learnt Circassian, but relations in the film are clearly marked by mutual distrust. Ilana has to pretend to be Circassian around her boyfriend’s friends, and their relationship is evidently scandalous in the Jewish enclave. While she does love him, he also serves as a means for rebellion. Nalchik appears as a series of uncomfortably interlocking ethnic groups, who at best tolerate one another, and at worst turn to violence.

Balagov was also clearly interested in the nuances of mutual support within the Jewish community of Nalchik. The family’s attempt to gather the ransom fee at the synagogue (too insulated to involve the police in their problems) results in an offer, from one opportunistic patriarchal figure, to purchase her father’s workshop and all of his tools. They have no choice to accept, and with this, Ilana and her father lose both their purpose and their livelihood. Later, when Ilana’s mother scolds her for dating outside of their, as she puts it, ‘tribe’, Ilana retorts that in failing to come up with the money charitably  their ‘tribe’ has ‘shown us its arse.’

This romantic rebellion against their faith is one way in which Ilana vies for independence as a woman. Balagov holds that ‘Caucasian society is more patriarchal, Jewish society more matriarchal,’ and although Ilana’s mother, Adina (theatre actress Olga Dragunova) is definitely a more forceful and complex character than her husband, Ilana’s freedoms are still massively limited. This is proven over and over in the narrative, and also in her physicality: Ilana is constantly being manhandled, shoved teasingly into a car boot by her boyfriend, picked up and put down by her brother and her father. In the final analysis she has little control over her body, and by extension, her life. It’s a performance of an almost unwatchable intensity from Zhovner. Balagov and his co-writer Anton Yarush were sparing with the dialogue, so nearly everything is communicated through her facial expressions and the movements of her body, which are apt to take on an expressionist-dance quality.

The stylistic aspects of the film all contribute effectively to a pervasive feeling of claustrophobia. It lives up to its title — as Balagov says, ‘there was a key word I insisted on while directing them [the crew]: “constriction”’.

For this film, he was ‘a fierce advocate of direct sound’, in other words, dialogue recorded as spoken during a scene, which results in a complex and breathy soundscape, dialogue often lost among domestic clinks and rustlings. The camera jerks occasionally, ‘as if it was having a fit’. Tesnota’s colours, if muted and muddled at first, resolve as the film progresses into jewel-like shades of blue, red, saffron yellow. Considering the tiny budget precluded on-set shooting in Nalchik (save for four days filming exteriors) you get a powerful sense of time and place.

In view of the fact that Balagov was just 26 years old at the time, Tesnota is an extraordinarily mature debut. The acting is shrewd and responsive, and despite the dramatic narrative, the film is utterly free of hysteria. It testifies to a talented director’s ability to create atmosphere and drama from very little money, and we should look forward to Balagov’s first English-language feature, Butterfly Jam, the production of which was announced in May 2024.

Film details: Tesnota (2017), directed by Kantemir Balagov. Watch on Kanopy here.

🗞️ Subscribe to OC Culture Dispatch

For our culturally curious readers: a free, biweekly selection of film, book, and music recommendations from the Caucasus. Our team offers a varied selection of hidden gems, cherished classics, and notable new releases from all over the region, included in our newsletter.