From the description, A
Brief Excursion, the first fiction
feature by Croatian director Igor
Bezinović whose career consists of
several documentaries and shorts, seems like a small movie that will
attract big labels like “existential”, “artistic”,
“meditative” and so on. It follows the group of characters trying
to reach an elusive medieval church and see its frescoes that
transforms into a journey to a proverbial heart of darkness for each
one of them. The film premiered in Rotterdam’s Bright Future
selection and met some favorable reviews, so some more festival
exposure is likely and it will hit the home turf in Pula and Motovun,
but the hopes for some kind of regular distribution, especially
abroad, might seem too optimistic.
Still, its modest budget, guerrilla-style shooting
against the backdrop of a well-known party destination Motovun Film
Festival and the cast of mostly non-professional actors playing the
semi-fictionous versions of themselves (all of them are kinda-sorta
recognizable faces from the nightlife scene of country’s capital
Zagreb) might seem as a gimmick, but it is not, for the most of the
time. It is also an adaptation of a well-known short novel by Antun
Šoljan that is the part of Croatian
high-school curriculum, already adapted by the same filmmaker into
his short A Very Brief Excursion
(2014), but not in the straight, expected way. It is more faithful to
Šoljan’s
spirit, style and themes it dwells on than to the chain of real and
surreal events it is portraying.
Stola (Bezinović’s
co-writer Ante Zlatko Stolica)
is our guide and unreliable narrator that tells the story from his
memories presumably some years after the events, so some details are
not in the right place. Back then, he was an aimless 20-something,
probably a student trying to figure out what to do with his life
while partying with like-minded proto-hipster people over the course
of one summer that might change everything. His almost legendary
friend Roko (Mladen Vujčić)
proposes the excursion to the monastery ruins near the place called
Gradina (which can be anywhere and clearly symbolises the Utopia),
and two of them spend the night convincing a group of people to join
them.
But the excursion does not go as planned: the bus
breaks down and the crew of seven people continue their trip on foot,
not exactly sure where they are going. As they are going on and on,
things around them are getting more and more peculiar and hikers one
by one drop out of the crew for some strange reasons. Do the ruins
and the frescoes really exist? Are the young people completely lost?
Is it all a dream? Is it all about the journey and not the
destination, as the cliché suggests?
Some parallels could be drawn to Andrea
Arnold’s masterpiece American
Honey, even though Bezinović’s
film was shot before Arnold’s
came out. The theme is similar, the aimlessness is kinda inherent for
young people trying to figure out their own way in the game called
life, regardless of someone’s socio-economic status. The other
thing is hedonism and partying that rarely breaks the sub-cultural
frames. And finally, Bezinović
and Arnold
both employ some documentarian techniques in their work.
The differences between the two films are notable,
though. While Arnold’s
characters come from the skid row milieu of American Midwest,
Bezinović’s
are middle-class to well-off urbanites, more spirited and spiritual.
Their hedonism, even though totally within the rigid hipster frame,
seems more genuine than Coca-Cola commercial-like parties in American
Honey. The type of documentarism is
also different, Bezinović
shows more emotion towards his characters by keeping the camera
fluidly moving around them in close vicinity, trading the grandeur of
the statement for audio-visual poetry, while Arnold’s
approach is more epic.
A Brief Excursion
is not that much about the youth nowadays as it is going for
universal, eternal questions of growing up, developing intellectually
and spiritually, friendship and the relationship between the journey
and the destination, the process and the goal. The source novel was
first published in the 60‘s, in socialist Yugoslavia and through it
Šoljan
was examining the laziness and lack of motivation and courage to
confront the authoritarian regime in the search of personal freedom
and happiness. Fifty years later, the country and the regime are long
gone, the new social frame is also more or less rigid and the
revolution (that might be started from a bed, like in Oasis’ song)
or a better world still seem like a futile dream.
Modest in the terms of budget, but with a rich and
layered story and character development and very detailed in
execution, A Brief Excursion
is a film worth several viewings over the course of years. Small, but
brilliant touches like the slight differences between the text spoken
by the narrator and the picture seen on the screen and the sound
design in which the ambiental sounds are mixed with occasional bursts
of minimal ethno score could pass under the radar. While not
necessarily being a masterpiece, A Brief
Excursion is more than a sure-handed
debut. It is pretty impressive.
No comments:
Post a Comment