Early in Levan Koguashvili’s Brighton 4th, the aging Kakhi (Levan Tediashvili) packs three wheels of Georgian cheese into a suitcase. Behind him, several medals and a framed photograph make up a modest shrine to his youth as a wrestling champion. With Kakhi himself out of frame, the camera lingers on his photograph while a wistful, almost haunting flute melody rises on the soundtrack. It plays through a cut to a black-and-white montage of wrestlers training, one of whom resembles the young champion in the photo. This montage is a journey into Kakhi’s interior, these memories his most important luggage.
With another cut, we see the streets of Brighton Beach from Kakhi’s POV from within the vehicle that’s picked him up from the airport. All the while, the flute plays on, providing continuity between Georgia and America, between Soviet past and post-Soviet present. Only later do we realize that the car is a hearse. Kakhi himself doesn’t notice until he’s dropped off and the woman who owns the boarding house where he’ll be staying berates the driver. Nor does Kakhi mind, for as he points out, “we’ll all end up in a hearse anyway.”
This brief sequence exemplifies not just the mood of Brighton 4th, a fatalism tempered by affection for the world, but also its thematic concerns: the complications of cultural heritage in an émigré community, heroism in the face of futility, death as a function of life.
The plot unfolds at a pace that, like Kakhi, is unhurried yet self-assured, submerged in the rhythms that govern life in the ramshackle boarding house, shared by a large cast of émigré eccentrics. He has traveled to the U.S. with his gift of cheese to help his son, Soso (Giorgi Tabidze), who’s in debt to a Russian gangster, Amir (Yuri Zur), who’s also a former wrestler. Kakhi is a man of discipline surrounded by gamblers. Like his brother, who bets on football in a vain attempt to circumvent the corruption of post-Soviet Georgia, his son plays cards in the face of the decrepit American dream. For both, hard work and perseverance are all but futile.
Still, Soso wants to remain in the States, having found a Russian woman, Lena (Nadia Mikhalkova), who’s willing to marry him for a green card. Their marriage may turn out to be more than one of convenience, but they can’t afford it until he pays off Amir. It’s a nicely sketched subplot, but considering Brighton 4th’s concern with overturning stereotypes, it’s a shame that Lena, and women in general, are given so little to do in the film.
A couple of fellow boarders offer Kakhi a chance to settle Soso’s debt. All he has to do is help them intimidate a Kazakh immigrant, Farik (Tolepbergen Baisakalov), into paying four months of back wages to the Georgian women in his employ. As they put their plan into action, Brighton 4th ramps up the momentum and jettison’s its tonal shading as this quiet domestic drama ventures into the terrain of a crime thriller. This would only reinforce the stereotype of post-Soviet criminality if it weren’t a sleight of hand by Koguashvili.
The boarders succeed in taking Farik hostage, but he turns out to be more than a petty crook. Their shared Soviet past brings them together, and before long they’re eating, drinking, and singing together—one of several scenes in which the Georgian cheese brings everyone around a table to enjoy life, their communal habits temporarily overcoming desperation. There’s a thin line here between Soviet nostalgia and yearning for the communalism that the Soviet Union never delivered. Kakhi realizes that the temptation to warp his wrestling discipline into thuggery will only feed the cycles of debt and violence afflicting the community, so in spite of his heart condition, he decides to challenge Amir to a wrestling match instead.
The film culminates in an effecting scene on the beach, shot like a duel with the silhouettes of the two fighters and their seconds circling each other in a hieratic dance, grappling before a desolate backdrop of sea and sky. Should Kakhi fulfill his role as a classic, almost Herculean hero, the play-violence of sport may replace the all-too-real violence awaiting his son, absolving his debt and breaking the cycle which turns everyone into criminals just to survive. But as the hearse has already telegraphed, life requires sacrifice one way or the other.
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