What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

Many old Europeans, including my grandmother, had their superstitions; the evil eye, the protective gestures, the whispered warnings against certain glances or envious attention. Alexandre Koberidze has taken one such ancient belief and turned it into a love story fable: two young lovers in Kutaisi, Georgia meet by chance, fall instantly in love, but are cursed by the evil eye so that when they arrive for their first date, their physical appearances have changed and they cannot recognize each other. It's a charming premise, whimsical and melancholic in equal measure.

But that's not what this film is about. The love story, enchanting as it may be, functions as a stage, a production design element for a much greater theme: identity.

The "evil eye" curse doesn't just alter appearances; it strips away the lovers' defining characteristics entirely. Giorgi, who was defined by football, his skill and passion for the game an essential part of who he understood himself to be, gives away his ball to local kids. Perhaps they can grow up to play the game that no longer defines Giorgi. Lisa, a pharmacist, loses her profession, her knowledge, the identity she built through years of training. The film asks the fundamental question: who are we, really, when the things that define us are taken away? Are we our professions, our talents, our physical selves? If all of that is stripped from us, what remains?

This is where Koberidze's film opens into something far more expansive. The personal question of identity, the lovers searching for themselves and each other in their transformed states, becomes a lens through which to examine a larger question: Georgian identity itself. There are subtle remarks throughout the film, hints about the South Ossetian war, quiet acknowledgments of Georgia's fierce independence from Russia. Georgians have their own identity, hard-won and fiercely protected. Georgia has had occupants for nearly two million years; empires have come and gone, conqu...