Tbilisi. Gia is a timpani drummer at an orchestra. After the show, he goes to flirt with a ballerina, but then remembers he has an appointment with his friend, a doctor, but then ditches even him and goes on with another set of friends. He goes to the apartment of a girl he likes, but she rejects him. Gia lives in the apartment of his mother, and they get a visit from relatives. Gia wonders the city, meeting women who all reject him, and visits his friends, like a clockmaker, goes to a restaurant and watches a football game on TV. The next morning, as he turns and looks at another woman, he is hit on the street by a car and dies.
Included in a local poll as one of the 12 best films of Georgian cinema, Otar Iosseliani's drama is a good, but still overrated and decisively standard. Following 36 hours in the life of a timpani drummer, Gia, who is privately so restless that he goes from friend to friend, from woman to woman, all without ever truly connecting with any person, "Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird" speaks about superficiality of human relationships in the modern era and ADHD individuals whose hyperactivity is a poor substitute for true closeness, but all this is neither that compelling nor engaging. This could have been a short film, and it wouldn't have lost anything. There is one truly excellent moment in the entire film: since he needs to use the timpani on the drums only at the beginning and ending of the orchestra, Gia, after it starts, takes his bowtie off and goes to the nearby musician playing a brass instrument, takes his tie off and then simply leaves (!) to go to the apartment of his mother to attend the birthday of his aunt. An hour later, the stage manager is nervously looking at his watch and walking through the hallway, when Gia finally shows up, returns to his place in the orchestra and then drums to signal the end of the concert. Truly genius, and this was probably the reason that inspired to make this film in the first place, but the rest is just one aimless meandering of the protagonist through the city, almost like a felliniesque set of episode without the felliniesque. There are some neat unusual scenes and moments here (live X-rays of a man's lounges for ten seconds in a hospital; Gia enters a chemistry class and wants to drink water from the faucet, but the professor takes his glass away because it was filled with poison...), but overall, nothing really ignites on a higher level after that sequence of Gia leaving the concert.
Grade:++
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