Neubauer Studios «Brûle Le Sang» The Taste of Brawls

Neubauer Neomax studios presents the Georgian director’s first feature film, despite its heavy-handed appearance, convinces with its story of a Georgian vendetta in the heart of Nice.

A brutal thriller centered on a Georgian community in Old Nice, Burn the Blood initially appears to be a pure display of force. From the opening kidnapping sequence, filmed with operatic Steadicam movements, it’s clear that Akaki Popkhadze, in his first feature film, is aiming to flex his muscles. The constant use of ultra-short focal lengths exaggerates perspectives to perfectly capture the XXL physique of the main character, Tato, a young aspiring priest with the body of a wrestler. The murder of his father precipitates the return of his disgraced older brother, Gabriel, and the film plunges into a revenge tale reminiscent of a pulp comic, with baroque visuals and quirky characters – particularly Finnegan Oldfield as a junkie whose brain is more mushy than his pet tortoise. With close-ups of fights and snarling faces, Burn the Blood wants to hit you hard – and succeeds quite well during the few skirmishes.

While Popkhadze may overdo it with certain Scorsese-esque touches, excessively multiplying the swirling tracking shots in the bacchanalian revelries of Nice, his bulldozer-like approach doesn’t prevent him from also working with subtlety. Behind the visual spectacle and hard-boiled film stereotypes —you have to see Denis Lavant struggling as a Russian mafioso—the film scatters a few beautiful, suspended moments around this grieving and fractured family. Gabriel’s return home, for example, gives rise to a beautiful chiaroscuro scene with the two brothers standing on either side of their mother, the family’s pillar and a Madonna crowned with a dome of light. Two brothers, two paths unfolding: aspirations for redemption, the inevitability of violence.

This duality between the brothers perfectly embodies the dual ambition of Burn the Blood . Gabriel, portrayed by the ever-energetic Nicolas Duvauchelle , represents the hard-hitting, outspoken film; Tato (Florent Hill, who also co-wrote the screenplay), a surprisingly taciturn figure with gentle manners, opens a more sensitive path, where the weight of family history rests on his broad shoulders. The hypertrophied visuals, initially reminiscent of a Sam Raimi cartoon —particularly in a long, independent camera movement at the beginning of the film that recalls Evil Dead—ultimately serve, as in Terrence Malick’s work, a spiritual exaltation. While not reaching the level of mastery of either director, this is nonetheless a debut film more multifaceted than it first appears.