Writer and Director: Marija Kavtaradze
There are many ways to be asexual, the least explored of the LGBTQIA+ acronym. For Dovydas in Slow, Lithuania’s candidate for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, his asexuality doesn’t mean that he wants to be single. He’s a romantic asexual and wants to have a relationship but he doesn’t want or need the sex that usually comes with prescribed heteronormativity. This focus on romance makes Slow the most touching film of this year’s BFI Flare Festival.
Dovydas meets Elena when he acts as a sign language interpreter for her deaf students. That they both use their hands in their work – he for translating the lyrics of trashy Europop songs into sign language and she for her interpretive dance classes – is never commented on by the characters, but the camera underscores the way they make language using their bodies. There are other hands too; the hands of a masseuse, the veins straining against her skin, as she presses her fingers into Elena’s flesh. Elena’s own fingers are busy with rings. Dovydas’s brother makes the heart sign with his.
At first, Elena, who likes sex, is unsure of embarking on a relationship that won’t be physical in the way she is used to. But the affair still turns out to be sensuous. Their caresses – more hands – and their kisses in the bedroom are filmed from a distance, but there are closeups of their faces, both filled with a mixture of desire and guilt. Neither is in the wrong or the right, although we see more of Elena as she dances in her studio or flirts with other men. In comparison, Dovydas remains a cypher.
The unknown is enthralling for Elena. Some of the emotions she feels are familiar from other relationships, but the few times that she and Dovydas do fumble through sex, the newness is raw, simultaneously exciting and frustrating. Both actors are convincing. Greta Grineviciute lets the viewer know her feelings without ever saying them out loud, best observed in the scene where she wakes up early in the morning, kisses Dovydas’s neck, and forces herself to go back to sleep.
Kestutis Cicenas’s Dovydas is a more withdrawn figure, his joie de vivre almost out of reach. Only once does he drop his inhibitions, creating his own form of silent disco for Elena at his brother’s wedding party. Otherwise, most of the emotions come from his eyes. It’s easy to believe that he loves Elena deeply and writer/director Marija Kavtaradze is not afraid to linger the camera on his face. Even when wearing a face mask, Cicenas is capable of signalling love and, at times, jealousy.
Kavtaradze’s film is not flashy in the slightest. Elena seems to live in a rundown area of an unnamed city and her dance studio appears to be in some industrial estate. She and Dovydas walk through streets that are piled with excavation work and puddles line the pavements of the seaside town they visit early in the film. While they sleep, car alarms sound in the middle of the night and people chatter in local parks. In a world where only some lifestyles are accepted, their relationship should be perceived as ordinary and as unassuming as the city they inhabit.
Not everything works, however. There is too much music in the film where the lyrics point too obviously to the emotions that the two characters are feeling and the fact that Elena’s best friend is a nun, another person who doesn’t miss sex, is a little on the nose. Celibacy and asexuality are, anyway, not the same thing.
But Slow is a brave film in an age where sex rules. These two people want the same thing but in different ways. Elena and Dovydas must compromise if they are to have a future. But a future is possible.
Slow is screening at BFI Flare 2024 from 13-24 March.
