Sunday, December 1, 2024

100 Words on Alexandre Koberidze's What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021)

 


By Thomas M. Puhr

A man and woman fall in love after bumping into each other twice on the same day. Their fate is jeopardized, however, when each awakens inside a different body the morning of their first date. Thus begins Georgian writer-director Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), which struggles – not unlike its star-crossed lovers – to maintain the near-overwhelming romantic spell it establishes in these opening scenes. Still, Koberidze’s paean to cinema’s magical powers (to unite people, to capture reality in a way that lived experience somehow can’t) will reward those attuned to its unhurried wavelength.