“Supporting Role rides an idiosyncratic but charming enough wavelength.”

Georgian cinema, at least on the international front, is largely unified in its wry and forlorn portrait of the country, whose fields and cobblestones come tinged with a pallid, post-Soviet glow and framed with increasingly claustrophobic precision. The big names — Dea Kulumbegashvili, Rusudan Glurjidze, even Alexandre Koberidze — often recall less the grim socialist-realist parables of yesteryear than they linger, ever so longingly, at the bleak and undulating landscapes to distill the malaise within, but also the unmooredness without. Nine years after her debut, Scary Mother, Ana Urushadze joins her compatriots in furnishing a languid and intermittently successful narrative of personal and existential displacement. In Supporting Role, the lead protagonist is a has-been actor named Niaz (Dato Bakhtadze) who struggles to contemplate, much less continue with his hitherto decent career and life.

Moody and unshaven, Niaz shuffles along the streets of Tbilisi, a more haggard and world-weary version of Ethan Hawke and his performance as Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. He contemplates ending things when his pet bird, his sole companion and remaining link to the outside world, flies away and dies. At an audition for a minor role in a feature debut, Niaz is visibly sceptical of Aza (Elene Maisuradze), its young female director, and of her macabre and mysterious storyboard. His character has only one monologue, a sober and desperate confession against the youthful folly of solipsism. She describes his onscreen transformation as a literal skin-shedding experience, much like a snake’s; for the better half of Supporting Role, Niaz figuratively exorcises his ghosts and pines, however unwillingly, for a muted catharsis at the hands of his friends and lovers.

Running at a hefty 140 minutes, Urushadze’s trance-like sophomore feature is quick to establish its distinct mise-en-scène: while the open parks and spaces invite blistering contemplation, its warm yellow and pink interiors (which comprise the bulk of Niaz’s self-imposed confinement) proffer some refuge from his impending disorientation and irrelevance. Where Scary Mother articulated the gendered and familial tensions facing aspiring novelist Manana (Nato Murvanidze) through its flirtation with primal horror aesthetics, Supporting Role highlights an equally disquieting if stereotyped identity crisis of the artist as hapless chauvinist, profiling the great and unmet expectations of an actor used to the spotlight and for whom nothing less than attention — whether through heroism or through villainy — could suffice. Murvanidze, now cast as Niaz’s estranged wife Liza, sports a pixie cut and an equally curt disposition towards her former partner, whom we gather walked out on the family because he could not accept their special-needs son Tato (Lasha Mebuke). Yet neither she nor a host of ex-girlfriends are particularly cold towards him; ironically, in a film about being sidelined and ignored, the main character reaffirms his presence by revisiting the forgotten corners of his life.

Supporting Role rides an idiosyncratic but charming enough wavelength, antithetical to the maximalist gestures of Paolo Sorrentino yet on par in its fascination with the ever-malleable prospects of redemption. With time slipping through his hands and the deadline to firm up his part in Aza’s film on the cusp, Niaz embarks on a series of captivating asides, drifting in and out of the tangential narratives around his wanting persona. A friend and erstwhile paramour’s (Nino Kasradze) accident brings him briefly into her orbit, then out again; another former partner (Eka Demetradze) is pregnant by a much younger man; the death of his venerable film professor (Niara Chichinadze) sends him on a journey to reconnect with Tato. And so on: the proceedings of his halcyon regrets are inflected with a comedic touch, a tad less meta-fictional than Alejo Moguillansky’s Pin de Fartie but equally wistful as a tale of ceaseless regeneration and metamorphosis. The tone is mostly drab, but Urushadze finds her way through to ruminate on the supporting roles we all play in the lives of others — and our own.