A late comeback: "Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry"

Like life, it's almost all over before it's even begun. The heroine of Georgian director Elene Naveriani's Cannes favourite Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, 48-year-old beauty store manager Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), is introduced tumbling over the edge of a ravine and only just succeeding to cling onto this mortal coil. As a pictorialisation of what it is to hit middle age, it's uncannily accurate: a rapid descent, leaving our gal to grab whatever comes to hand in the hope of maintaining some distance between herself and a premature grave. This will prove a real kick-bollock-scramble. Once Etero returns to level ground, she throws herself around the neck and torso of the vaguely baffled Murman (Temiko Chichinadze), a married delivery driver. Only in the aftermath of the pair's first sexual encounter, on a stockroom floor, do we learn Etero has finally put paid to her virginity, her erstwhile chastity a consequence of having to raise an abusive brother and tend to an aging father in the wake of her mother's demise. Soon, we appear to be back in Poor Things territory, looking on as this latter-day maiden aunt flings herself at the outside world, armed with a renewed appetite and appreciation for life, before the Reaper can return to make a more definitive claim. On a literal, basic level, that oddball title is a list of what Etero sees atop the ravine before she tumbles backwards into a new life: either a nondescript life flashing before a woman's eyes, or nonsensical last words. (A fourth word is missing: blackness.) But it also anticipates the way Etero changes her life up, and refuses to give into expected routine. Stretching ahead of her (and us) over these two hours: a late-life discovery of sexting, Viagra and afternoon delight in a moderately priced hotel room.

This quest for greater self-determination proceeds with an organic oddness, as opposed to all that forced oddness chez Lanthimos. No fish-eye lenses are required, just Naveriani's in-all-senses curious observation of frames prone to sudden, unusual, unexpected interruption. At the end of that first sequence, just after Etero has inched her way back up to the top of the ravine, a car roars past with some sort of flamingo lilo on the roof, as if to underline the fact that most people hereabouts are having vastly more fun than our heroine. Equally, I don't quite know what to make of the gigantic filo pastries Etero becomes fond of consuming. (Asked in a restaurant whether she wants to take one or two of the slices she's ordered home with her, she raises a firm hand: why wait?) No need for expensive CGI or production design, either; here is the absurd life we would find all around us were we to take a moment to appreciate it. The idiosyncrasy extends to the casting. Tossing all traces of vanity to the wind - presumably because she too has realised life's too short - Chavleishvili would appear to have physically more in common with the rumpled Michael Stuhlbarg or the hulking Michael Shannon than the svelte, yoga-toned Diane Lane types who typically get to have midlife awakenings in our romantic cinema. Yet in her unsmiling, uningratiating, predominantly black-clad way, she remains an extremely funny, incongruous screen presence - almost exactly the last person a movie such as this would normally focus on. The risk would be Ulrich Seidl-like misanthropy, yet Naveriani remains fiercely on her protagonist's side, never more so than when juxtaposing her with the more forbidding members of this community. Why shouldn't the Eteros of this world enjoy an arc of their own, a few scattered moments of late-in-the-day triumph? It's just that the film is never sappy or sentimental about showing it. As Etero smiles at a text she receives from Murman, Naveriani occasions a priceless cut to a village elder scowling at her from the other side of the bus; that rarest thing, a genuine surprise ending, unfolds against the backdrop of a Tbilisi downpour. Here, as elsewhere in Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, life goes on - but there's absolutely nothing routine about it.

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry is now screening in selected cinemas.