Review: Unclenching the Fists Palpably Conjures the Ties that Bind, and Fray

Set in the industrial town of Mizur in the North Caucasus, writer-director Kira Kovalenko’s Unclenching the Fists follows the trail of sorrow left behind by a young girl, Ada (Milana Aguzarova), trying to escape the grip of her domineering father (Alik Karaev). The ailing man hides Ada’s passport from her, forces her to keep her hair short, and mostly locks her inside their apartment with her younger brother, Dakko (Khetag Bibilov), who treats her as something between a mother and a love interest. Ada is allowed to go to work, but there, too, she’s ensnared in the forceful grip a young colleague, Tamik (Arsen Khetagurov), who pesters her for sex only to lose his erection when she finally surrenders.

In Unclenching the Fists, men are horrible but also more than a little pathetic, and misery is the inevitable destiny for Ada and just about everyone in this gloomy part of Russia near Georgia. There are shades of Béla Tarr here, such as the saturated colors that at times capture Ada’s state of mind, evoking the grainy blue hues of Almanac of the Fall. And the final scene of Ada riding on the back of a motorcycle, barely holding onto her bag by its strap, recalls the indelible image that closes The Prefab People, of Judit Pogány’s dejected wife riding on the back of a truck holding onto her mini washer. In both Tarr’s and Kovalenko’s film, a cherished object is symbolic of the desire to catapult away from so much agony.

In Unclenching the Fists, the possibility of Ada’s escape rests, figuratively and literally, on the shoulders of her older brother, Akim (Soslan Khugaev), who’s managed to leave the household and find work in another town. When he returns to Mizur for a visit, she effectively smells freedom off his jacket. One of the film’s most indelible touches is how Ada forges an intimate relationship with her world through scent, as she’s constantly sniffing the traces of things as though they were secret paths, or exits, from Akim’s clothing to his neck, which smells of their father’s touch. She also smells, with the anxiety of certain criminals, her fingertips for the remnants of the makeup that her father makes her throw away in the sink.

The singularity of Unclenching the Fists resides in such small gestures, alternately pained and wistful, as when the typically hyperactive Ada pauses for a second to simply imagine a life for herself where delicateness is possible. Though violence haunts the film, Kovalenko refreshingly avoids letting it inhabit the center of the frame. Violence is glimpsed only in the shape of aftereffects, such as when Ada and Tamik compare scars (“I was blown up once,” she tells him), or from afar, from neighborhood kids playing with explosives as though they were tennis balls to a physical altercation involving Ada, Akim, and their father.

Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman’s body, but most exceptionally, the film is built on the disorienting contradictions that make up family relations. That is, the imbrication of aggression with affection, the strange yet banal craving to both kill, sometimes literally, and care for one’s tyrannical father.

The disturbing ambiguities of familial ties is rendered palpable in a sequence at a nightclub as Ada dances to a Chechen ballad with her brothers. There’s a subtly incestuous desperation to the way one brother snatches her away from the other, as if trying to eliminate the other in order to keep Ada to himself. Eventually, the competition ends with a group embrace in the middle of the dance floor, a sort of silent pact of love, after which Ada vomits in her mouth. In the context of endless trauma such as Ada’s, the sequence suggests that even gentle forms of affection are too unwieldy, too unprecedented, for this young woman to bear.