‘A Room of My Own’ Review: A Deceptively Potent Portrait of Female Friendship in Covid-Era Georgia

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang With eternal respect to Virginia Woolf, whose “A Room of One’s Own” clearly inspires the title of Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze’s beautifully articulate miniature, even before a woman needs money and her own space to be able to pursue self-fulfillment, she needs to know she needs those things.

Bliadze’s superbly performed, remarkably immersive Karlovy Vary competition entry is one such story of tentative, interior emancipation, described in the tiniest arcs of change: the width of a smile, the warmth of an embrace, the directness of a gaze.

As such it is hardly cinema’s most tempestuous act of female empowerment, but the work of dismantling oppressive patriarchies, such as that which underpins modern-day Georgian society, needs both sledgehammers and subtler instruments.

The room in question is a poky box at the back of a narrow two-bedroom apartment in Tbilisi. The rent is 600 lari (about $200) per month, to be shared equally between worldly party girl Megi (Mariam Khundadze), and her newly arrived roommate Tina (Taki Mumladze, also, crucially, the film’s co-writer).