In Géla Babluani's sinister and surreal debut film 13 (Tzameti) you’ll see the most bizarre game that you've seen on screen in the past two years, an evocation of Dante’s tenth circle of hell. I spoke to the film's young director in Brussels. The English remake is due in 2008, but the current theatrical version is already subtitled. In the movie, Sébastien, played by Géla's real life brother George, takes the place of a morphine junkie, travels to the country to an abandoned house, and finds himself in a strange game of life and death.
Géla Babluani is mostly quiet. We’re in a hotel in Brussels – a place reserved for sleeping, with its typical sound-deadening carpet. The French Georgian director responds with short answers, tired of being in a Parisian editing room until five this morning. Maybe I should wake him up.
I got sick when I saw your film this morning.
That wasn’t my intention.
But you know what I mean?
Yes, but still, it wasn’t my intention. Or the opposite, I didn’t want to make the audience happy either. I wanted to tell a story on the way people manipulate each other. It’s just that we live in a world of consumption and a world of elimination.
Tzameti is an attack on capitalism?
No, it’s much simpler. We are at first human beings and not socialists or capitalists. Manipulation isn’t inherent in capitalism, it’s inherent in human beings.
The film is pretty raw and violent. It’s definitely a cynical view on life.
I got my first gun when I was thirteen years old. Violence and death were part of everyday life and that’s part of who I am now. I didn’t realise that back then. Only later on at seventeen, when we lived in France I realised the voilence was one of the things that made me who I am. And I tell the story, I want to tell the story without dramatizing it. I don’t want to make people cry or feel miserable by showing violence. But I have to say, I am not optimistic about humanity. First I thought the violence was only possible in Georgia. But it isn’t. That’s why the film is set in France. Violence is a part of everyone. It doesn’t matter where they’re from.
The film is shot in black and white, there’s not much dialogue and hardly any music. You don't hand the audience much to cling to emotionally.
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