TIFF.20 – Alexandre Koberidze: “If miracles can happen, the other can happen too”
A boy and a girl meet on the street, no clues about the time they live in – only their legs can be seen entering the shot; a book falls on the ground, one of them bends down to pick it up; the scene keeps repeating. After this series of coincidences, they both decide to meet the next day; they go on their separate ways, crossing the tracks. At no point does the director Alexandre Koberidze get too close in these scenes, and the dialogue is seen through either extreme close-ups or wide shots (an establishing shot of the shining city lights). Any doubt about the counterintuitive way in which this Bressonian encounter is constructed (others would have relied on close-ups or at least a type of shot that would have revealed their faces) soon dissipates, when the protagonist is disturbed in her path by a twig, a pipe, a lantern, all announcing that she and the young boy have been touched by a curse. For them not to recognize each other again, Giorgi and Lisa's faces will change overnight, and their talents (she was a dedicated pharmacist, he was a football player) will also vanish. The fairy tale imagined in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky has nothing surreal about it; the heralds of the curse are actually objects in Lisa's vicinity, which come to life only through voice-over. After the “transfiguration”, the two quickly get over the reality reflecting in the mirror and continue untroubled with their lives. As in any fairy tale, things are in plain sight, but the curse can't be removed – the tragedy is that every day they see each other from a distance and even exchange words without any of them recognizing each other.
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.
