‘Repentance’ (NR)

Tenghiz Abuladze's "Repentance" comes to us with a great deal of advance press lauding it as a most significant example of the relaxations in censorship under the Soviet policy of glasnost. And in the tolerance shown by the Soviets in allowing these criticisms to be aired, it is a startling document. Watching it, we are constantly amazed that a film so outspokencould ever have been made there.

It should also be stated, though, that its significance as a social and historical document far outstrips its value as art.

The protagonist in Abuladze's absurdist allegory is Varlam (Avtandil Makharadze), the mayor of a small Georgian village, a threatening, slablike presence with a Hitleresque nose bristle, Mussolini-style black shirt and Stalinist haircut. Varlam is a great character -- a sort of totalitarian composite. In the film's opening movement we learn of his death, watch as his friends and family praise him as a great and good man, and witness his burial. The problem with Varlam, though, is that he won't stay planted. The next morning his body appears propped up against a tree in his son's back yard and is returned to the grave, only to reappear the following morning.

As a result, the corpse is arrested, though it's not really to blame. The culprit responsible is a middle-aged woman named Katevan (Zeinab Botsvadze), who bakes cakes topped with elaborate spun-sugar churches. During her trial, she gives a record of Varlam's brutality, describing how he imprisoned and eventually destroyed her father, an outspoken artist named Sandro (Edisher Giorgobiani), and caused the death of her mother in addition to countless others.

Abuladze has called his film, which was finished in 1984 but wasn't screened in the Soviet Union until the end of 1986 and won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes last year, a "tragic phantasmagoria," and in it he has blended surrealistic dreams, fantasies and magic to create an allegorical fascist wonderland.

The film's approach is Orwellian; in scenes like the one in which Varlam visits the artist's home, he turns around the meanings of words, spouts Shakespeare and Confucius ("It is hard to catch a black cat in a dark room. Especially if there is no cat") and breaks repeatedly into operatic song to throw his hosts off balance. Varlam's power over his regime is based on nonsense and confusion. Surrealism, in his world, is doublespeak.

But what Abuladze lacks is Orwell's terrifying lucidity; in "1984" we're plunged into a nightmare that's so familiar the implications are unavoidable. But during much of "Repentance" the nightmare is alien, obscure. Abuladze can throw striking, hallucinatory images onto the screen, and he succeeds in creating a disorienting counterreality, but the connections that would make his dream meaningful are missing. Granted, Abuladze's symbolic landscape may be more familiar to Soviet audiences than to Westerners, but our difficulties in making sense of the material can't all be ascribed to cultural differences.

Given these obstacles, we spend too much time puzzling out the basic relationships and working through thick sequences that confuse rather than clarify. There are flashes of brilliance -- for example, in the harrowingly poetic scene in which Sandro's wife Nino (Katevan Abuladze) and the young Katevan frantically search through a lumberyard where logs just delivered from a labor camp are said to have the whereabouts of their exiled husbands whittled into their trunks. And as Varlam, Makharadze is a darkly brilliant study in murderous, not-so-petty despotism.

But there are also long patches of unredeemed and ponderous explication. And though Abuladze clearly has talent, he has been unable to sustain a unifying style. During her trial, Katevan vows that for as long as she lives, she will not allow Varlam a moment's piece. "Burying him means forgiving him," she says. In "Repentance," Abuladze does the opposite; in exhuming the dark Stalinist past, he begins the process of forgiveness.