Dir.: Salomé Jashi; Documentary; Germany/Netherlands/Switzerland/Georgia, 2021, 91’.
Georgian writer-director and co-cinematographer Salomé Jashi (The Dazzling Light of Sunset) offers a quietly devastating portrait of a country whose natural heritage is being sacrificed to the whims of extraordinary wealth. Her subject is former Georgian prime minister and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose extraordinary passion for collecting mature trees has become an exercise in environmental destruction, local acquiescence and naked displays of power. The trees are legally purchased, their owners compensated, yet the consequences for the landscape and the communities through which they travel are anything but benign.
Ivanishvili, who maintains an extravagant private zoo containing kangaroos, penguins and zebras at one of his Black Sea villas, has embarked on an ambitious landscaping project around his country estate near Tbilisi. His ambition is to transplant enormous, mature trees into a newly created private park. Jashi follows one such undertaking: the removal of a 135-year-old tulip tree, weighing an astonishing 650 tonnes, from its village home in western Georgia and its transportation some 40 kilometres along the Black Sea coast.
The opening is surreal, as though Fellini and Werner Herzog had collaborated on a particularly improbable dream. Two men fish on the Black Sea shore when, suddenly, a tree appears to float across the waves. Only as it approaches does its extraordinary cargo become apparent: the tree is travelling on a barge. It is an arresting image, at once absurd and strangely beautiful, setting the tone for a documentary in which the monumental and the mundane continually collide.
In the village of Tsikhisdziri, the supposedly straightforward business of relocating a tree becomes an immense engineering operation. Ivanishvili has apparently bought it legally, explaining that giant trees are his hobby and that he is developing a park. Workers deploy excavators, drills, pipes and an assortment of heavy machinery to prise the tree and its vast root system from the earth before loading it onto two coupled heavy-goods vehicles. The operation will take approximately three months, requiring the construction of new roads and the laying of planks to accommodate its extraordinary passage towards the coast.
Yet the real cost is borne by the surrounding landscape. Trees standing in the way are felled or brutally trimmed; neighbours along the narrow village streets find their own gardens and trees sacrificed to accommodate the billionaire’s botanical ambitions. Compensation is offered – reportedly 500 lari per tree – but the villagers’ reactions are as revealing as they are contradictory. One resident shrugs off Ivanishvili’s reputation, observing that, whatever sort of villain he might be, at least he is doing something. Nobody, apparently, previously cared about the trees. Another man, slightly drunk and considerably less accommodating, declares that he will never give way to the transportation workers, even if it means going to his death.
There is a curious mixture of resignation, resentment and pragmatism in these encounters. Once the damage is done, some villagers console themselves with the prospect that the mutilated trees will flower again in a couple of years. An elderly woman quietly punctures this optimism with the question: “But will I be alive then?” It is one of the film’s most poignant moments, exposing the gulf between the billionaire’s grandiose vision of permanence and the limited horizons of those whose lives are being disrupted to accommodate it.
Jashi wisely eschews explanatory narration, allowing the images and the villagers’ own voices to construct the film’s political argument. Her observational approach finds poetry in the machinery of destruction, contrasting the harsh physicality of the work with the almost dreamlike spectacle of the tree’s passage across the Black Sea. The sheer scale of the operation is frequently astonishing, but the director never loses sight of its human consequences. The villagers are neither simply victims nor straightforward collaborators; their responses reveal the compromises and dependencies that money can impose on a community.
Celia Stroom’s choral score lends the closing images an elegiac quality. The barge and its enormous arboreal passenger give way to the billionaire’s new park, where the transplanted trees stand alongside a bamboo forest. The final impression is unsettling: has this living landscape found a new home, or has it merely been incarcerated within an elaborate private collection?
Taming the Garden is an extraordinary study in the absurdities of wealth and the commodification of nature. What might initially appear to be an eccentric billionaire’s horticultural obsession gradually reveals itself as something much more troubling: a demonstration of how private power can reshape an entire landscape, with little regard for what must be destroyed along the way. Jashi’s achievement is to make this environmental and political critique without ever spelling it out. Her film is both a visual poem and a quietly furious warning of a world in which everything, even the oldest and most magnificent living things, has its price.
In UK & Irish cinemas 28th January 2022