The Forbidden Fruit
Op-Ed
Somebody, somewhere, for some presumably justifiable reason and interest, wanted and managed to create a movie which is a fresh but trivial paradigm of gay lifestyle, taking place in a Georgian dance company and depicting the affair of a male homosexual pair. Not a big deal at first sight. As a matter of fact, this newly born piece of art should have been inconsequential by any stretch of cinematographic taste and curiosity. But the habitual Georgian attitude towards homosexuals and the overly animated sentiments used to appreciate their physical ways and means, quickly made the film as consequential and sought after as a masterpiece of our time.
Was this good or bad? Neither! It was simply unnecessary: why should anyone be given the chance to enjoy the commercial advantage of this magnitude absolutely free of charge? The movie, titled ‘And Then We Danced’ has received in Georgia a monstrous advertising opportunity like manna from the skies, a real windfall that one might get once in a lifetime or never at all.
It is difficult to evaluate the potential box-office success of the movie now that the anti-gay community of Georgia has already promoted it unwittingly but very aggressively by taking to the streets of Tbilisi and Batumi to protest its screening outside movie theaters. I have no numbers, but I suspect with some reasonable confidence that most people in Georgia have zero tolerance for gay men and women. I don’t know exactly where this much glaring belligerence and blatant aversion for the gay lifestyle comes from, but a fact is a fact.
Nobody knows for sure the number of pros and cons of homosexual predilection in this country, but the overall picture is that most Georgian men and women have a problem with it, hence the protest against the movie which shows that a gay lifestyle may thrive even in a Georgian national dance company, where both the masculinity and the femininity of dancing characters are pronouncedly vivid and obvious.
On the other hand, the situation seems to be helpless because no manifestation can help the gay-haters prohibit the screening of the movie. One may achieve prohibition in a couple of movie theaters, but what can you do with the internet’s limitless potential to show anything without any problem, killing on the spot the attempt to abrogate the ‘unwelcome’ piece of information? There has already appeared a solid article in Wikipedia about the film, saying that it is a 2019 Swedish-Georgian drama film directed by Levan Akin and which was selected as the Swedish entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. This is already a recognition which cannot be ignored and shunned. Yet, all those efforts must be abortive due to modern technology, and not only. The world has drastically changed in the last fifty years, starting with the notable time of sexual revolution, associated with the name of the incomparable Marilyn Monroe.
It would take only an elementary smart mind to realize the probable result of a forceful measure like a massive demonstration against a film which would have otherwise disappeared from our life as it has appeared – unnoticed and without any pain in the neck.
By Nugzar B. Ruhadze