Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry review – a gentle gem about late-life love and loneliness

Here is a marvellously tender story of loneliness and love which starts with a bigger bang than most thrillers. Etero, played by Eka Chavleishvili, is a middle-aged single woman in a remote Georgian village who is out walking near a steep ravine, collecting blackberries for the cakes she likes to bake. She looks up, transfixed by the beauty of a blackbird – having been, we are perhaps invited to assume, only waiting for this moment to arrive – when she loses her footing and disappears from the frame; film-maker Elene Naveriani switches the viewpoint to something terrifying and vertiginous: straight down to a near death experience.

Etero sees her own corpse in a parallel universe of her own stricken imagining, but this heartstopping near-miss, together with the unwelcome new symptoms of what appear to be menopause, coincide with what could be a whole new lease of life. While listlessly minding the family shop, Etero receives some stock from flirtatious new delivery driver Murman, played by Temiko Chichinadze, and soon she is having a gloriously passionate, sensual and thrillingly secret affair with this man. And in the long stretches of solitude while he is away, now filled with gorgeous wondering instead of dullness, the film shows how Etero must now absorb the paradox – what has ended is not her life, but her 48 long years of virginity. Her life has not been easy. She has desperately missed her late mother, who died of cancer when she was just three months old. But now life has repaid her with a miracle.

Naveriani’s movie, adapted from a 2020 novel by the Georgian writer and activist Tamta Melashvili, has a cool and even rather deadpan self-assurance which shows the influence of Aki Kaurismäki or Elia Suleiman. The characters sometimes hold each other’s (and the camera’s) gaze emphatically – but Naveriani insists on something realer and more naturalistic. It’s a film which tells us what most films contrive to ignore: love and sex is not just for the lovely and the sexy and the young. This is a gentle, sensual gem of a film.

• Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry is in UK cinemas from 3 May