‘Supporting Role’ Review: Dato Bakhtadze Captivates in a Nocturnal Odyssey Through Tbilisi
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- Ana Urushadze's second feature 'Supporting Role' won the Special Jury award and FIPRESCI prize at Rotterdam in January, and now competes in the main competition at Sarajevo.
- Dato Bakhtadze stars as Niaz, a lumbering Georgian movie star who accepts a one-scene role from an androgynous indie director (Elene Mausuradze) and drifts through 139 minutes of depopulated Tbilisi nightscapes in delirious soul-searching.
- The film draws on Bakhtadze's Hollywood muscle roles in 'Wanted' and 'Extraction 2' to set up a character arc where Niaz must find vulnerability and softness, culminating in a scene where he shaves one eyebrow in front of a mirror.
- Urushadze based the film on her own experience making her debut feature 'Scary Mother,' which won Locarno's Best First Feature award in 2017, and uses the character of Aza as a self-portrait.
- The review compares the film's 'old-school Jim Jarmusch' existential wandering and post-Soviet gallows humor to a dreamworld immersion, with composer Sten Sheripov's jazzy, bass-heavy refrain accenting the wry romanticism.
- Surrealist touchstones recur: a roadside herb reappears during a tender meeting with Niaz's former partner, and a finger doodle on a fogged-up window resurfaces like déjà vu, anchoring the film's meditation on the hazy boundary between performance and real life.
Why it matters: Bakhtadze's pivot from Hollywood heavy ('Wanted,' 'Extraction 2') to a vulnerable festival lead is a career turn, and Urushadze's back-to-back festival wins — Rotterdam FIPRESCI for 'Supporting Role' plus Locarno Best First Feature for 'Scary Mother' in 2017 — cement her as a distinctive post-Soviet voice with two features in eight years.
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