In Rusudan Glurjidze‘s weathered, wintry sophomore characteristic “The Vintage,” the title may consult with any variety of withering relics: the good-looking, richly patinaed gadgets of furnishings that Georgian immigrant Medea (Salome Demuria) illegally imports from her homeland to Russia to promote; the once-grand however disintegrating Saint Petersburg condominium that she buys at a lowered value, on a peculiar situation; or Vadim (the late Sergey Dreyden), the condominium’s aged, crotchety former proprietor, who insists on dwelling there even after the deeds have been transferred. Or it may simply be Russia itself, a venerable state immune to an evolving inhabitants, captured right here within the midst of an aggressive 2006 drive to expel or get rid of hundreds of settled ethnic Georgians.

Glurijidze’s movie typically hardens and freezes with lingering anger over that injustice, however that’s beneath the hotter veneer of a genial culture-clash story, during which ostensibly opposed characters acknowledge in one another a standard diploma of injury: All the things and everyone seems to be a bit shopworn in “The Vintage,” which isn’t shy about stretching an elegiac metaphor. Just like the director’s beautiful 2016 debut “Home of Others” — likewise chosen as Georgia’s worldwide Oscar submission — her second characteristic is a melancholic, atmospheric and ravishingly shot slice of latest historical past, funnelling wider social and political crises by extra intimately drawn character conflicts.

If “The Vintage” doesn’t fairly have the haunted, bone-deep influence of its predecessor, its gently tempered sentimentality could carry it additional on the worldwide arthouse circuit following a competition run that obtained off to a troublesome begin. Initially pulled on the final minute from its Venice premiere slot, as a result of an alleged copyright dispute that the filmmakers declared an try at Russian censorship, the movie ultimately had a belated bow on the Lido — now boasting battle scars which will lend extra forex to its stand in opposition to Georgian oppression in Putin’s Russia.

Performed by Demuria with a flinty, carefully guarded air of self-containment, Medea is a brisk pragmatist who, like a lot of her compatriots, has left Georgia for financial causes — and is not any nice hurry to type human connections in Saint Petersburg, the elegant however icy streetscapes of which slightly swimsuit her non-convivial nature. Even at her job in a drafty antiques warehouse, she works in predominant isolation, taking orders from an unseen upstairs boss who communicates solely by intercom. On this crystallized imaginative and prescient of mid-2000s Russia, it’s each man and girl for themselves — all the higher to flee authoritarian discover. The surprisingly roomy interval condominium that Medea buys on the movie’s outset is an ideal refuge: Peeling, dilapidated and nonetheless cluttered with yellowing remnants of a long time previous, it’s a spot for many who could be forgotten.

It comes with a catch, nonetheless. Octogenarian widower Vadim, a former authorities official, makes his continued tenancy within the condominium a situation of its sale, and who treats his new, younger roommate with brusque contempt — a combination of his personal ornery misanthropy and ugly xenophobia inherited from the tradition round him. Distance and mistrust is the previous man’s default place towards different folks, whereas the youth curling matches he often attends as a spectator are the closest he involves human contact.

But with out a lot concession on both aspect, relations step by step thaw between these two obvious opposites, who’re, if nothing else, mutually inclined towards solitude. Neither one can completely stay an island, although Vadim usually cultivates an estrangement from his stuffy, materialistic son Peter (Vladimir Vdovichenkov). Medea, in the meantime, can’t completely reject the persistent advances of her Georgian ex Lado (Vladimir Daushvili), whose journey to Russia in pursuit of her lands him within the crosshairs of Russian deporters.

The sluggish softening of the movie’s central, cross-cultural, cross-generational relationship may veer into maudlin territory if not for the gracefully restrained performances of Demuria and Dreyden — the latter in his ultimate display look earlier than his dying final yr. There’s sufficient perverse, typically grimly humorous particularity to their characterizations to complicate the allegorical leanings of the movie’s script, written by the director with an nameless collaborator, which etches micro-portraits of gaping human disappointment in a bigger panorama of mass tragedy. However the chief pleasures in “The Vintage” are ones of time and place and temperature, all evoked by the misted lens of ace Spanish DP Gorka Gomez Andreu — an ASC Highlight award winner for his work on “Home of Others.” As soon as extra layering the body with oxidized textures redolent of water injury and mirror rot, his exacting compositions counsel a pained current turning into shameful historical past earlier than the very eyes of its members.