Subscribe RSSMr. Iosseliani, 76, a leggy man with lidded eyes and a wisp of a mustache, begs time out for “just a puff or two” on a cigarette. He returns a while later, having checked out the bar, but dejectedly no vodka is served. At last, we sit to talk about “Chantrapas,” his autobiographical fantasy. In an Otar Iosseliani haze, everybody — young and old — smokes, drinks, and disobeys the regime.
“Chantrapas,” a conflict cry for independence, is set during his childhood. The story goes from the filmmaker’s family home in Tbilisi to Paris, to his lunatic free filmmaking years.
In the movie’s Georgia, parents hit children, and kids get back at them — it looks like nasty weather all the time. “Yes, but it’s not really brutality,” the filmmaker says. “You have to be worthy of the right to give a slap — also, you can only slap somebody you care about. And you have to raise children the right way, so they don’t become crooked adults.”
