The film’s tone is unique: it is a comedy of absurd gestures (a stolen pig, a runaway telescope, a village screening of Emmanuelle that goes hilariously wrong) wrapped around a tragedy of unreciprocated love. Sybilla is both the agent of chaos and its ultimate victim. She is too young to understand the consequences of her desires, but old enough to feel their sting. What makes 27 Missing Kisses unforgettable is Nutsa Kukhianidze’s performance. At 15, she embodies a dangerous kind of freedom. Sybilla is not a victim or a seductress in the conventional sense; she is a force of nature. She smokes cigarettes, lies without blinking, and stares at Alexander with an intensity that makes the audience squirm. Yet Dzhordzhadze never judges her. Instead, the film asks a radical question: What if a teenage girl’s desire is not pathology, but poetry?
As Sybilla rides away from the village at dawn, her face is a mask of stone. She has not been defeated, but she has been changed. And somewhere in the distance, 27 kisses float away—unclaimed, unforgettable, and utterly missing. If you enjoy lyrical, bittersweet cinema in the vein of The Dreamlife of Angels or The Virgin Suicides , seek out Nana Dzhordzhadze’s 27 Missing Kisses . It is a small film with a giant, beating heart.
Two decades later, 27 Missing Kisses feels eerily prescient. In an era of debate about age, consent, and the complexities of desire, the film offers no easy answers. It is not a cautionary tale, nor is it a romance. It is a portrait of a summer when a girl learned that kisses, like people, can vanish into thin air.
