REVIEWED - SINCE OTAR LEFT/DEPUIS QU'OTAR EST PARTI: Julie Bertuccelli's début feature is based around the sort of interesting catastrophe one might find in a story by Maupassant. Bolstered by beautiful performances, the picture takes that disaster and, interrupting itself too often to tread water, generates perhaps half an hour of heartrending drama. This is rather less than we might have hoped for in a 100-minute film, but considerably more than we sometimes receive.

The film, among other things a gentle political parable, concerns itself with a once comfortable, now down-at-heel family from Georgia who, rather confusingly, live their lives as if members of the French bourgeoisie. The elderly Eka (Esther Gorintin) lies in bed at night listening as her grand-daughter, Ada (Dinara Droukarova), reads to her from an early volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Ada's mother Marina (Nino Khomassouridze), the depressive in the family, is distressed by what she sees as Eka's preferential treatment of her brother Otar, who, though a doctor, is, as the film begins, working as a labourer in Paris.

Before long the family's fragile stability is broken when Otar is reported killed in an accident. Marina and her daughter decide not to tell the old woman and begin a complicated charade involving the faking of letters and the fabrication of unlikely excuses as to why Otar can no longer make it to the phone. They find themselves in the invidious position of trusting that their loved relative will not live long enough to discover the truth. Then, to their horror, Eka sells her precious library and announces she is going to Paris to see her son.

Staying, for the most part, just the right side of mawkishness, the film trades in a class of easy humanism that has recurred consistently in European cinema down through the decades. Shot in watery shades, Since Otar Left is always watchable even if its central premise is stretched somewhat too thinly. Donald Clarke