In Bloom (2013)

Today's film is In Bloom, which takes place in the country of Georgia during the early 1990s.  This was right after the collapse of the Soviet empire.  So, Georgia in the 1990s looked a lot different from America.

What do I remember from the 90s?  I remember there were a lot of grocery stores that were convenient, and a lot of tacky fast food restaurants.  There were no coffee shops like Starbucks back then, at least not in Florida.  There was one Dunkin Donuts, but their coffee is hella nasty.  There were no Walmarts to rape the small towns with their presence, but they would soon come.

  What is interesting is that Georgia had none of this!  All of these things are examples of capitalism, and there's nothing like that there.  It was definitely a no-frills country.  They had just been freed from the rule of the Soviets, but still were working out some issues.  There was widespread poverty and violence was the norm.  There were still daily breadlines and every parent somehow managed to be an alcoholic.

Dealing with all this are two fourteen-year-olds, Eka and Natia.  They just want to go to school and live a normal life.  A boy named Lado likes Natia and gives her a gun as a gift.  Well, he may be more Floridian than we thought! That is a totally normal gift here, but for most of America, a girl may appreciate roses or chocolates more as a romantic gift.  The gun plays a significant role in this film.  The gun is actually meant to protect her from a practice called "bride kidnapping" which is exactly what it sounds like.  However, Natia gets kidnapped and forced into marriage anyway!

At first, Natia doesn't mind because her new husband is nice and her in-laws are more cordial than her loud drunken family.  But soon, she learns that married life isn't as great as it appears to be.  She was only 14 and had to drop out of school.  Then, Lado returns and Natia's husband gets insanely jealous.  He kills Lado, and Natia becomes furious.  Naturally, she would want justice for him.  Eka is the only one who doesn't think violence is the answer to anything, as her father lives faraway in prison for murder.

It never shows what Natia decides to do with the gun, or what her husband's fate is.  We do see Eka throw the gun in a lake.  Was she trying to prevent more violence, as she did not want to see Natia suffer the same fate as her father?  Or was she hiding evidence?

It ends with Eka taking a trip to visit her father in prison, something she has never wanted to do before.  The films ends before we see him.