27 Missing Kisses 2000

Fourteen-year-old Sibylla, Nutsa Kukhianidze, arrives in a small Georgian village for a summer visit with her grandmother. At the outset, Mickey, Shalva Iashvili, a boy her age, narrates that Sibylla had promised him 100 kisses that summer but only delivered 73, leaving 27 missing kisses as the title hints at and the mood of the film suggests. The story unfolds in loosely connected episodes, with Sibylla roaming freely through the village and countryside, sometimes entering homes uninvited. She is often by Mickey’s side, yet she develops a noticeable crush on his father, Alexander, the 41-year-old astronomer, Evgeniy Sidikhin, whose life and affairs become the center of her observant, curious gaze.

The plot threads are observational and intimate, as Sibylla witnesses the relationships and infidelities of various villagers. The mood grows more daring after the town attends a screening of the 1974 French erotic film Emmanuelle, an event that both Sibylla and Mickey secretly witness from behind the theater screen. Some encounters are played for comedy—such as an engineer involved with another man’s wife, where a ball-bearing ring traps his partner in a ribald mishap—while other affairs drift toward harsher, less pleasant consequences. The film keeps its tone deliberately episodic, balancing moments of humor with more provocative, troubling situations.

Sibylla forms a friendship with a French ship’s captain, Pierre Richard, who has towed his vessel to the village outskirts in search of his “lost sea.” Her curiosity leads her to shadow Alexander as he seduces other women, and she pushes the boundaries by sneaking into his bed at night, pleading that he marry her and promising she would make a better wife than the others. Startled from sleep, Alexander orders her to leave, a confrontation that amplifies the film’s tension rather than resolving it.

The tension erupts in a tense moment when Mickey discovers Sibylla and his father, half-naked outside the house, and misreads the situation as a completed affair, grabbing his father’s rifle in a surge of protectiveness and fear. Sibylla runs away, but not before a shot rings out, and she climbs aboard the captain’s ship, which is still being towed toward a river. As the vessel makes its way toward open water, Mickey’s voice-over circles back to the haunting refrain of the missing kisses: 73, never quite fulfilled.