13 (TZAMETI) Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Palm Pictures
Grade:B
Directed by: Gela Babluani
Written By: Gela Babluani
Cast: George Babluani, Aurelien Recoing, Philippe Passon,
Pascal Bongard
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 7/13/06
Opens: July 28, 2006 The screens are loaded with movies about sports: basketball, baseball, soccer, football, swimming; sometimes extreme sports are put to film such as bungee jumping, skiing, even skateboarding. But about a sport so extreme that most players die? This is the subject not only of Michael Cimino’s 1976 drama “The Deer Hunter” (about young Pennsylvania steel workers who are forced to participate in Russian Roulette while in Vietnam) but of Gela Babluani, a filmmaker born in Tiblisi, Georgia. While Russian roulette is arguably the most important segment of “The Deer Hunter,” the game covers at least half the time of “Tzameti”’s ninety-three minutes. (“Tzameti” means “13" in the Georgian lanaguage, which sounds as manly and macho as the game that becomes its leading character’s memory. The sport, which evokes more sweat than an hour of basketball though the participants do no running, becomes the focal point of Babluani’s film. Babluani, using his own script, takes us to a twenty-something ethnic Georgian, Sebastien (Georges Babluani), whose job as a roofer in France does not pay enough to support him and his brother. While repairing a roof, he suffers the misfortune of seeing the homeowner (Philippe Passon) die of a drug overdose before paying him. More desperate than ever for those euros, he finds an envelope enclosing a first-class train ticket and a letter, both of which elicit the promise of a killing (financially, if not otherwise). While he is tracked by French police who are trying to break up a ring of vicious gamblers and would-be gladiators, he evades the posse. He winds up in a chateau housing only rough, tough men with money and is forced by them to play the game. He cannot leave, much as he’d be happy to forego a potential fortune, because he senses that most of the “gladiators” will die. The game is: first one bullet in the chamber. Each player points a revolver at the head of an opponent who, in turn, points his gun at another. The ante is upped to two bullets, then three, then four, until presumably there will be one winner left standing. The winner gets a fortune. Gamblers are paid off if the men they select do indeed shoot their fellow players. Photographer Tariel Meliava captures a noir ambiance, filming in black-and-white (which could turn off prospects of a commercial audience if subtitles to the spoken French does not hit them), and in CinemaScope. The color comes from the game, the stark photography only upping the tension that an audience is expected to feel as we watch sweat dripping from the brow of Sebastian, the freshman gun-toter, while signs of angst are surprisingly absent on the faces of the experienced players. There are no winks from the players to indicate that this may be a spoof of the 1950 movies–the ones that starred Robert Mitchum, for example, as the character Donner in “Nightkill.” Babluani’s aim appears to be to show that human beings–make that men–are sufficiently bored with eking out a normal living but are not much interested in surfing or skydiving, both of which offer more chance to come out alive. Tense though the game may be, “13" is far less complex than “The Deer Hunter” and for my euros does not offer the thrills of Michael Cimino’s masterwork. Nonetheless the acting is strong, particularly that of Pascal Bongard as the master of ceremonies, who does not talk: he bellows. “When the globe lights up, that’s when you shoot,” he declaims. He succeeds in evoking a world of extreme sportsmen who care little about sex but indulge almost gleefully in mortal violence. Not Rated. 93 minutes 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online | 
