Review of Power Trip (2003) by Tom W — 06 Sep 2007

In 1999, American energy corporation AES bought then government-owned Telasi, the power station in Tbilisi, Georgia, and began charging its customers for power for the first time. Power Trip documents the next four years of turmoil that the company and the people of Georgia underwent during this ill-fated attempt. AES basically threw the Georgians into this capitalist scheme without any sort of strategy for adjustment, expecting the people to adapt even though the average $25-per-month electricity bill was already more money than many (if not most) people's entire wages. The Georgians did start to adapt, but not in the way AES had hoped: they just kept coming up with more and more ingenious ways of stealing the electricity. AES also had to deal carefully with the government, as the president and other lofty politicians would redirect power to themselves and their friends and family so that even when customers paid, AES still couldn't provide the electricity they had paid for.

Clearly, there are many issues at play here: the transition from a communist economy to a capitalist economy; how a country under someone else's control for 70 years deals with independence; the influence of the West (the USA in particular) on financially weaker countries with a strong cultural identity; corporate responsibility; government corruption; even a little post-Cold War politics as the Americans deal with the Russians, who are still trying to maintain control of the post-Soviet satellite countries. (AES strove to remain in Georgia even after they had lost more than $200 million. Eventually their shareholders forced them to pull out; frighteningly, Telasi is now owned by the Russians.) I was amazed at how keenly and succinctly Devlin presented all these issues and kept them in balance, while at the same time painting a good portrait of Georgian culture and following the story of a particularly charismatic AES employee (the English Piers Lewis, an old friend of the director's who pretty much threads the film together) as he dives into the culture and deals with the customer base on a more personal level (he's the only foreign employee who took the time to learn the language) which adds yet another level of thematic material to the film.

Throughout all of this Devlin remains cool and non-polemical. His film is not about the Evil American Corporation taking over the Poor Defenseless Third-World Country, nor is it about Progressive Business trying to convince some backwater yokels to step into 21st Century global economy. Devlin realizes the problem is much more complex than that, and it's to his immense credit that he presents that complexity accurately without letting it confound his film in the process.