A surprise reappearance throws the life of middle-aged widow into otherworldly flux in this strangely affecting drama
![Comets review – a lovers’ reunion charged with cosmic poignancy](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9831b7c09b11fb340df703145ce1b825f3e04fe0/212_0_1547_929/master/1547.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctcmV2aWV3LTMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=3a5ec255d83cbab53f8097d605741ee7)
Here is an intriguing cine-novella from Georgian film-maker Tamar Shavgulidze, which is at first unassumingly contemporary and realist, but which then takes a deadpan left turn into something really strange; it becomes like something from the 1960s counterculture, yet is as coolly paced and controlled as everything that has gone before.
Initially, Comets seems like a straightforwardly bittersweet “reunion” tale, full of poignant regret. Nana (Ketevan Gegeshidze) is a middle-aged widow who is pottering about her garden one sunlit afternoon, squabbling mildly with her grownup daughter Irina (Ekaterine Kalatozishvili), when suddenly they have a visitor: a rather stylishly attired woman of Nana’s age, also called Irina (Nino Kasradze). This is the person with whom Nana had a semi-secret love affair when they were teenagers, which caused much local scandal. Irina ran away to begin a glamorous existence in Krakow and
Berlin and Nana blandly (or perhaps penitentially) stayed in her home town and had children: Irina is of course named after her lost love and like the older Irina she exasperates Nana by wearing sunglasses to conceal her mood.