Georgian director Eldar Shengelaia’s film Blue Mountains from 1983 has already been showcased on the Klassiki streaming service: a clever satire of Soviet bureaucracy. Now one of his earlier films, from 1973, has been revived; aptly entitled The Eccentrics, it is a very different proposition. You’d be hard put to divine a political or satirical meaning here exactly, although you can find one if you really want. This is more a daft, knockabout comedy, a festival of silliness which looks like something the Georgian cousin of Richard Lester or Terry Gilliam might have made. It is a wacky, goofy fantasy that comes into its own in the final 15 minutes and lets you forgive it for all the broad indulgence that has gone before.
Demno Jgenti plays Ertaozi, a hapless young man from the country, rendered penniless by paying off his late father’s debts. He goes to the big city to seek his fortune, falls in love with a married woman, Margalita (Ariadna Shengelaia), and is wrongly imprisoned for trying to kill Margalita’s army officer lover. In jail, he befriends an ageing scientific genius called Qristepore (Vasili Chkhaidze), a veritable Leonardo figure with a plan to design and build his own flying machine.
Having escaped from prison, our two heroes manage to create their homemade plane with help from another lover of Margalita’s, and their rickety, hovering contraption comes into being. Outrageously, Shengelaia simply uses a crane (just out of shot) to hoist it into the air, uses more crane and airborne shots to give us the point-of-view of these magnificent men in their flying machine waving down to the tiny people below, and even uses very audacious and perhaps dangerous wire-work to give us a long shot of the plane in flight. I wish he had given us this plane earlier in the film, because you can’t help laughing every time you see it. There’s something sublimely innocent in it all.
• The Eccentrics is available from 15 June on Klassiki, and screens on 25 June at the Ciné Lumière, London.
