Georgian actor and director Giorgi Megrelishvili is nothing if not ambitious. When he couldn’t secure financing for a contemporary version of Hamlet in 2017, in which he also played the lead, he shot it on mobile phones. While the twin beasts of budgetary constraints and pandemic-related production challenges have crimped the vision and impacted the work ethic of many a filmmaker, they served only to further unleash his creativity, resulting in An Adventure of a Tiny Man and Gulliver.
An avant-garde dark comedy with thick, hearty ribbons of mystery, drama, social commentary, and adventure, the film is adapted in part from three different novels and can best be described as a cinematic experiment. While so many movies today seek to glossily package and re-serve an audience what its makers know they already like, the third feature film effort of co-writer/director Megrelishvili instead takes delight in playfully challenging all manner of conventions.
Briskly paced, clocking in at only 70 minutes, An Adventure of a Tiny Man and Gulliver bounces around and alights on several different stories, from the titular Gulliver (Malkhaz Asoev) to a chess grandmaster (Zura Azmaiparashvili) playing games for his life. Lending levity to the movie are two enterprising men seeking to trade on their resemblance to Jason Statham.
While his stylistic influences and wide-ranging intellectual inspirations run the gamut, Megrelishvili indulges a collagist sensibility more commonly explored in fine art. He clearly has a love of literature (in addition to the varied source material here, he once directed a short film based on an Ernest Hemingway short story), classic Hollywood cinema, and popular mainstream fare, and his juxtapositions of these references and speculative scenarios create all types of conversational starting points. With An Adventure of a Tiny Man and Gulliver, Megrelishvili looks out on the horizon and excitedly plants a flag for a time when audiences can once again gather to, as its trailer aptly notes, “grab popcorn and figure out a director’s intent.”