Many years ago, with a group of other theater enthusiasts, I worked through Jean Anouilh’s play Becket, meaning to put it on stage. We thought we could cast the story of the conflict between Henry II of England and Thomas Becket as a study of how people change, while they do not. Two stories which I streamed in the last year seem to have the same theme of discrepancies between the social perception of people and their internal reality.
I must be about the last person in the country to watch Amazon’s web series Made in Heaven. When it was released early in 2019, I watched about five minutes of it, and was put off by the initial shots of a wedding planner’s presentation. “Not another of those”, I muttered and flicked to the menu. Later, watching it over The Family’s shoulder, I realized that I should give it more time. It is a soap opera, each episode dedicated to one lavish wedding. But the stories behind the weddings are interesting enough that they would appear briefly in the news. Put it together with the continuing melodrama of the planners’ personal lives, and you get several hours of virtuous feelings of outrage. I loved it. It was the kind of thing that put me in a mood to exercise. Writers Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti tread a path well inside the line that separates Bollywood from art, but close enough to see the clear light of the other side through the glitter.
But the month before that, I watched the Georgian movie My Happy Family (2017), which lay on the other side of that ill-defined border. The second movie by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß to win big on the festival circuits was an engrossing watch. I didn’t know anything about Georgia except that Stalin was born there. As a result, I had no expectations whatsoever. It seemed to me that this story of a fifty year old mother who lives in a multi-generation family could have been set in almost any country in the world. Her dissatisfaction with her life, and her attempt to make it different, her uncomprehending husband and brother, and her baffled grown children are part of every society. I liked the acting of Ia Shughliashvili, who does the role of the sleep-walking protagonist Manana.The cinematography by Tudor Panduru was very interesting: the contrasts between dim indoor lighting and the exteriors, the changes in colour tones, worked very well with changes of mood. This is one of the less-known gems on Netflix.
Don't hold your breath 
