Georgian director Eldar Shengelaia’s film Blue Mountains from 1983 has already been showcased on the Klassiki streaming service: a clever satire of Soviet bureaucracy. Now one of his earlier films, from 1973, has been revived; aptly entitled The Eccentrics, it is a very different proposition. You’d be hard put to divine a political or satirical meaning here exactly, although you can find one if you really want. This is more a daft, knockabout comedy, a festival of silliness which looks like something the Georgian cousin of Richard Lester or Terry Gilliam might have made. It is a wacky, goofy fantasy that comes into its own in the final 15 minutes and lets you forgive it for all the broad indulgence that has gone before.
Demno Jgenti plays Ertaozi, a hapless young man from the country, rendered penniless by paying off his late father’s debts. He goes to the big city to seek his fortune, falls in love with a married woman, Margalita (Ariadna Shengelaia), and is wrongly imprisoned for trying to kill Margalita’s army officer lover. In jail, he befriends an ageing scientific genius called Qristepore (Vasili Chkhaidze), a veritable Leonardo figure with a plan to design and build his own flying machine.
