Interview: Gela Babluani

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Conventional plot lines fall into the morgue in 13 Tzameti, director Gela Babluani’s ferociously serene mediation on the consequence of choice, the nature of the survival instinct, the schism between classes, and the corrupting power of wealth. The film’s protagonist Sebastien (George Babluani, brother of the director), is a young Russian immigrant living a squalid existence with his family in a dead-end town in rural France. A series of coincidences that conspire to feel like destiny lead him to a chateau in the French countryside where he agrees to compete for a potentially life-altering fortune in a high-stakes game of Russian Roulette played before an audience of well-heeled gamblers.

Filmed in stark black-and-white with high contrast lighting reminiscent of Roman Polanksi’s Knife in the Water, 13 examines a netherworld populated by mundane characters with extraordinary hungers that lift them beyond societal norms and boundaries. Babluani’s spare, fluid style—you will not find a single extraneous frame in the entire film—and his impeccably lean, revealing dialogue compels us from the start of the narrative to emotionally invest in the journey of a young man about to shed his innocence in the shedding of blood.

There must be no ambiguity,” declares one character in 13. But Babluani’s film is tantalizing rife with ambiguities that force us to confront our own convictions on violence and class distinctions without once feeling as if we have sat through a sermon. The film draws you in, by the heart as well as the throat, and when it is over you may find your deepest moral certitudes challenged if not completely shaken. All this while being entertained by a movie that possesses the dark ironies and roiling tensions that pervade the great French noir of the 1950’s, quite a feat when you consider that the director is only twenty-six years old.

Born in Tblisi, Georgia, Gela Babluani is the son of the renowned filmmaker Temur Babluani (The Sun of Wakeful, La Migration des Moineaux). His earliest memories of cinema include sitting with his father in the local movie theater on weekends to watch many of the great Russian silent films and the influence of these classics can be seen throughout 13. Babluani demonstrates a skill that is rare for a director of his years, the ability to convey a character’s inner life and values in only a few brief shots with minimal dialogue. He has created a world in which the eyes have it, whether they belong to the little girl whose smiling glance testifies to the protagonist Sebastien’s generous heart or the brutal Number 6 with the cement stare that ultimately softens with compassion at a climactic point in the film.

It was my privilege to discuss 13 with the director while he recently promoted the film in New York City.

Richard Lally: Your actors say more with their eyes than their mouths. Is the spare dialogue a general preference?

Gela Babluani: I’m not very talkative myself and I don’t like to write too much dialogue. I prefer letting the images tell the story without all the talking. Cinema is, above all, a narrative told through images and if not, we have radio, we have television and we have the cinema of bad taste.

RL: Each of your actors had an inner stillness, their emotions seemed to rise from an organic center without any artifice. How did you bring that out?

GB: Some of the actors were professional, some were not professionals. And what I did when I started casting was to find actors who could make me believe in this world I was creating, who seemed to live in that world already so they did not have to act as if they were in that world, they were already there. For example, one of the characters had to be twenty-five and a guy said, “Well, I have a brother who is twenty-two but maybe…” Those kinds of things were not for me. It was really the idea of creating a real and separate world.

RL: The flat black and white and your use of camera angles imposed a sense of desolation, so that even when we saw characters together, they seemed isolated and yet they do reach out and interact…

GB: It was important to show each character as an individual, with their own goals, their desires, and, of course we all live an individual life like the main character. But at the same time the decisions we make as individuals will have an effect on others even if we don’t think so at the time. Sebastien makes a decision that changes his life and the lives of others as well.

RL: At the start of the film, your soundtrack creates a strong sense of foreboding. As the stakes rise for Sebastien, why do you abandon the score except for a brief piano riff?

GB: I did not want to introduce an artificial atmosphere, to tell the audience what to feel with the music. At the same time I felt the audience needed a break at some point and that’s why I included the little scene with the piano.

RL: Your policemen appear just as sinister as the more corrupt element represented by the gamblers. Was that intentional?

GB: Some people would say there is no difference between them. They both want something from Sebastien and they will do whatever they have to do to get it. In the beginning you don’t know if they are a threat to Sebastien, you don’t know who they are. Why are they following him? What do they want? Later at different times both (the gamblers and the police) interrogate Sebastien and he feels threatened by both. And when they come face to face with each other, you have the idea that these are two separate camps but it’s almost like two armies facing each other.

RL: But one of those armies is using members of the underclass as entertainment, paying them to kill each other while they wager huge sums of money on the outcome…

GB: I didn’t want to place too much on the contrast between those two groups (gamblers and participants) but in a sense the money is a metaphor for the power and I wanted to show the craziness of it, that here is the way one group of individuals exercises power over another.

RL: With the only overt difference between the gamblers and the participants being the money. None of the gamblers dresses upper class, they’re not particularly brutal…

GB: In regard to the gamblers, the way I shot them, I wanted to show them in a very good light. It was not my intention to make them look like bastards, the way they were filmed. They look just like anyone. That’s what I think is the most shocking, that the gamblers seem so normal and this normality surprises us.

RL: Even the Russian Roulette has a normality. The inspector calls it a “dirty game of murder,” but is it murder? Doesn’t each participant make the choice to risk his life?

GB: It’s very interesting, what you say. At the end of the film, there are the people who survive. On our (French) internet site, I filmed one of the survivors. He’s not really a professional actor and he’s a little crazy. Good crazy. And if you go on the site you will see I ask this guy the same question, was it a murder or wasn’t it? And he said, “Of course not. Because everyone knew it was a game. It can’t be a murder.” But I think in real life, most people would say this is a crazy answer. Because that’s the interesting thing, at what point is it a murder and then it becomes not a murder. When does that take place. It’s like in real life. What is a real crime? I think that for criminals and crazy people, it is society that makes them as they are. So its society that is criminal.
…”

RL: How far is the Russian Roulette from the reality TV shows we have today? Isn’t it just a few steps away?

GB: In Europe we have these reality shows, I’m sure you have them here, where people are locked up in a house and interact and viewers call up to vote to have them thrown out or kept in and these programs are very successful. Why? Because there’s a real human side in the midst of all this shit, which is to carry on with the elimination, to see how it works, who will be judged inferior and tossed aside and who will be included. At the end, who survives. We deal with this elimination in our lives all the time. Not that we go out and shoot other people.

RL: At the same time, wouldn’t you say these reality shows, like the roulette, bring jolts of feeling, at least artificial feeling, to people who are numb and devoid of emotion?

GB: They have to see what it is they are feeling or should be feeling. And this is what I wanted to do with this film is make it seem realistic in the act of killing. This kind of death is unbearable and I wanted to present it in a way so that people would feel that this exactly how unbearable it is to actually kill, the effect if has on you in the moment of the act and after. Because death, I think, is simplified in the media. You know, in ordinary television and films, the main character can shoot ten people or more, kill them all at once sometimes, and then, in the end, he takes his girl friend in his arms, the film is super and everyone is happy. But the action of killing itself, what is it? What does that mean, death (in these films)? It’s something that’s made totally banal and we leave it that way by these images. And I think one of the tasks of cinema is to try to show the audience things they might not want to see, that are hard to watch, to show them how they really are.

RL: You’re doing an American version of this. Do you feel you have to adapt your sensibility to reach this particular audience?

GB: Yes and (laughs) I don’t really know if I’m up to it, if I’ve really adapted myself well to it all but I’m doing it. It will get done.

Palm Pictures releases 13 Tzameti on July 28th in New York with a wider release to occur in the weeks to come.