13 (Tzameti)
An English-language remake of this French thriller is already in development. But the film recycles so much I’d be surprised if it doesn’t get recycled in turn.
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Fight Club has been cited as one of the key models for Gela Babluani’s 13 (Tzameti), but Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) seems far more relevant, at least for its first half. In The Passenger an American journalist (Jack Nicholson) on an aborted assignment in North Africa encounters the corpse of a man he met earlier in his hotel and decides on impulse to take over the man’s identity, turning up for all of his appointments and seeing what happens. They lead into espionage and arms sales for a terrorist group, and as the journalist proceeds to Spain to keep the appointments, he does his best to elude people who are chasing him down in one or the other of his two identities.
Still, The Deer Hunter at least had a few things to say about working-class America before and after Vietnam. 13 (Tzameti) is supposedly set in France, and everyone speaks French, except when Sebastien and his family speak Georgian to each other. But the social and political climate, like the visual style of the black-and-white ‘Scope cinematography, is eastern European–especially the constant police surveillance, the omnipresent despair associated with poverty, and the gallows humor in response to capitalist corruption. And the defeatism of the final ten minutes is so pronounced we could just as well be watching a Russian gangster film.
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