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A nocturnal odyssey through the spectral streets of Tbilisi is conjured with mesmerizing effect in Georgian writer-director Ana Urushadze’s “Supporting Role.” On the heavy heels of Niaz (Dato Bakhtadze), a lumbering
Georgian movie star whose glory days are behind him, Urushadze’s second feature plays like an old-school Jim Jarmusch joint — all existential wandering and weird, winding conversations — but with a distinctly post-Soviet gallows humor. Having won a Special Jury award and the FIPRESCI prize at Rotterdam in January, the film now lands in the main competition at Sarajevo.
This mordant melange takes off from the opening sequence, when Niaz finds himself at a casting call for an indie directed by Aza (Elene Mausuradze), an androgynous female director with the pallid look of a Tim Burton extra. Winking back to Bakhtadze’s stints in Hollywood (“Wanted,” “Extraction 2”), Niaz is used to playing brawny leading men and taking direction from male auteurs. So he’s silent and slackjawed when “this tiny weird creature,” as he describes Aza, confidently pitches him a tragic one-scene role with no script — only a hand-drawn storyboard, the sole copy of which she lends him when he asks for three days to consider. So ensues a period of delirious soul-searching, given tremendous gravitas by Bakhtadze.
The film follows Niaz as he drifts through depopulated streets and former haunts like a dizzied mastiff. With a meandering rhythm, he encounters characters from his past, fans and random eccentrics who sweep him into their homes and vehicles as quickly as he slips away. Among them are an Armenian duo with whom Niaz goes to the spa; a few former lovers, including a statuesque makeup artist and a veiled actress; and a crowd of colleagues attending the wake of a veteran critic whose final unpublished work is an exhaustive study of Niaz’s career.
Too driven a character study to be the kind of trancelike reverie you might float in and out of sleep from, the film nevertheless challenges with an 139-minute runtime — a length that induces a dreamworld immersion. The film’s trippy side keeps Niaz’s reckoning from drowning in male sorrow, while the measured use of a jazzy, bass-heavy refrain by composer Sten Sheripov accents this wry romanticism.
Urushadze, to her great credit, employs surrealism with a delicate touch: a special herb that Niaz picks from the side of the road reappears later in the film when he turns out his pockets during a tender meeting with his former partner; a finger doodle traced on a fogged-up window resurfaces like a bout of déjà vu. An avatar for Urushadze, who based “Supporting Role” on an experience she had making her debut feature “Scary Mother” (which won Locarno’s Best First Feature award in 2017), Aza justifies her lack of a script by claiming that the visuals are most important. Urushadze agrees, complementing the film’s shadowy Tbilisi nightscape with bursts of jewel color: a turquoise bird, a room bathed in purple light, a bone-white body against midnight blue sheets.
Disheveled and brutish, Niaz is routinely greeted by his peers with wariness and surprise, his star faded by what is heavily suggested to be his own doing. But if the idea of Aza’s film triggers Niaz’s mourning over the death of his career — which is tied up with his old self — it also forces him to consider a new act, and perhaps the necessity of change in a world that’s beginning to shed its tolerance for the antics of male genius.
Eventually, he becomes obsessed with playing the supporting role. As Niaz searches desperately for a way into the character — at one point shaving an eyebrow, and being whisked away before the second one comes off — he finds the challenge posed by this novel part demands a softness and vulnerability he had long denied both onscreen and off. A sensitively observed meeting with his estranged son crystallizes the film’s ideas about the hazy boundary between performance and real life; we are who we play and those characters can reshape us, a notion that, in Urushadze’s hands, comes with a decent side of hope.
