Tbilisi after the end of World War II. Sculptor Aguli returns from the front back to his home and father Pipinia. Aguli has a giant marble rectangular cuboid in his back yard and plans to make a sculpture out of it, "Spring Lights". However, in the meantime he makes granite busts for the deceased at a graveyard, a well paid job. He marries Russian woman Glafira, who gives birth to their twins, and then another twins, and then a boy. Aguli argues with his father and briefly leaves home to have an affair with his childhood love Tina. He returns back to Glafira, and while wondering off to the graveyard, he sees his "exhibition" of busts. Aguli then hands over the marble cuboid to his apprentice Zaur.
Voted in a local national poll as among the 12 best films of Gerogian cinema, Eldar Shengelaia's humorous drama "Extraordinary Exhibition" is a bitter tale of how people have their dreams, but life forces them to accept ordinary jobs and never gives them the chance to use their full potentials, yet it does so with a lot of colorful humor and uplifting energy. The film starts with the protagonist Aguli, a sculptor, planning to make a special sculpture out of his giant marble rectangular cuboid, and ends with this same marble left untouched decades later, as he gives it to his apprentice who overjoys with a plan to do wonders with it—solidifying the allegory of this theme, hoping only that the next generation will have it better. Some of the humor really is well done—for instance, Aguli's telegram ("I will exhibit my new work "Spring" in the autumn..."); his tendency to try to add "artistic touches" to a bust of a deceased, so his widow as angry that her late husband's looks are not identical to the bust; or Aguli's argument with his dad, also a war veteran ("It was you who run faster than your own horse at Port Arthur! Well done, the Japanese!"). Shengelaia has good shot compositions, but the story is meandering and not always engaging, with several episodes (20th anniversary of classroom reunion with benches outside of ruins a fortress) that seem rather superfluous and unnecessary, whereas not every character is that interesting.
Grade:++
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