13 Tzameti (2005)

I’m guessing that for most people 13 Tzameti is “that movie with the Russian roulette circle of doom,” but Russian roulette is in fact its least interesting and clumsiest element. Perhaps less offensive than The Deer Hunter for not bringing a neocolonial war into the picture (yet lacking Christopher Walken), 13 Tzameti replaces the Vietnam metaphor with an emptier one: life is Russian roulette. The film could’ve made this more specific—immigrant life (our protagonist, Sébastien, has emigrated to France from Georgia) or life in contemporary capitalism (the money used to bet on the fates of the men involved seems to be American dollars)—but any hint of biting critique fades when we consider the fact that Sébastien chanced upon this illegal, deadly gambling ring that involves an indeterminate group of mixed races and classes anyways.

But really it’s the film’s low-key prelude that merits our attention. In this part of the film, Sébastien repairs the roof of a house by the Mediterranean Sea, both involved in the lives of the couple within and distant from it. Most of what he knows about them he gleans from listening through orifices in the architecture, a literal kind of eavesdropping that violates boundaries between public and private, interior and exterior. This violation a voyeurism via disrepair, it suggests that First-World infrastructure is merely crumbling façade and that the West’s repressed—the exploited populations of faraway and faceless strangers—can never be forever locked away, with flimsy walls or other forms of absurdity.