Just past the midpoint of Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? the narrative pauses for a five-minute montage of children playing European football on the blacktop of a fenced-in basketball court. Accompanied by Gianna Nannini’s 1990 FIFA World Cup anthem “Un’estate italiana,” the scene, which plays out entirely in slow motion, is at once part and parcel of this highly musical film’s many interludes and the most conspicuous of its untold number of narrative culs de sac. Breaking from the film’s tragicomic romance story to focus on the exuberant faces and energetic movements of real-life kids who otherwise have no bearing on the plot, it announces the conclusion to the first part of a film that, up to this point, had betrayed no signs of being bifurcated.
Here, in a single scene, we have the entire M.O. of the Georgianborn Koberidze, whose freewheeling approach to storytelling has, over the last half-decade, produced a small but invigorating body of work that makes the majority of what passes for adventurous modern-day narrative cinema look positively pedestrian by comparison. World-premiering in this year’s Berlinale Competition, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? follows Koberidze’s FIDMarseille-winning first feature, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), and like its 202-minute predecessor, the new film—running a relatively trim 150 minutes—is unafraid to stretch its legs and follow narrative avenues most movies would abandon in the script stage. Sharing with Koberidze’s earlier work a sense of the fanciful and fantastic, Sky expands on a number of themes and motifs that the Sony Ericsson-shot Summer carried in its roughhewn images as if in chrysalis. Shot on a combination of 16mm and high-definition digital, Sky will open even upon those familiar with Summer like an infant’s first glimpse of the natural world—imagine Brakhage’s age-old maxim about an eye unruled by manmade laws of perspective, only applied in narrative terms and with a comparably childlike sense of all that cinema is “allowed” to do.
Sky thumbs its nose at the notion of plot synopsis. Its would-be story—about a pair of would-be lovers named Giorgi and Lisa who, after a meet-cute in the film’s opening moments, are cursed by the evil eye to remain anonymous to one another after they wake up looking like completely different people—spills out in all directions after this inciting incident. Unknowingly circling each other as they continually return to a café where they agreed to meet, the new Giorgi and Lisa—never to be recognized, never to be reunited—proceed to go about their lives as the world moves on without their former selves. Structured as a series of diversions and flights of fancy, the narrative orbits this main storyline with the curiosity of a spectator looking on from the sidelines—and indeed, the film is narrated by an omniscient storyteller who adds context to Koberidze’s frequently dialogue-free scenes while ironically commenting on the action. (“They spent every day together, waiting for each other,” the voice says of the star-crossed couple at one point.)
Mirroring Koberidze and cinematographer Faraz Fesharaki’s frequent coupling of close-ups and wide shots, is both forensically detailed and quietly observed. No sooner do Giorgi and Lisa (played in pre-curse form by Oliko Barbakadze and Giorgi Ambroladze, and for the remainder of the film by Ani Karseladze and ’s Giorgi Bochorishvili) stumble upon each other in a daytime scene framed entirely from the knees down, than their fates are foretold in an evening sequence, shot from high above, in which Lisa
