previously published on Cineuropa.org
The films of Ivan-Goran
Vitez are always thought-provoking and laced with irony as
well as sharp social commentary, from his student films and shorts to
his work on TV series and on his features. After his intriguing mix
of woods slasher, politically incorrect comedy and social drama in
Forest Creatures (2010) and the World War II-themed satire
Shooting Stars (2015), Vitez has written and directed his
third feature, Extracurricular. A socially charged genre
piece set around a hostage crisis in a school, the film also opens an
array of social issues relevant to contemporary Croatia. It premiered
in the national competition of the Pula Film Festival and, as a
competently executed genre piece, should see a regular theatrical
distribution in the near future.
Vitez dedicated just the
right amount of time to exposition before events are set in motion.
He opens the film with a parallel montage of a man wrapping up a gift
and a woman dropping of her daughter at school on a very special day,
set against the tension-building soundtrack written by Jelenko
Hodak. The young girl, named Ana (first-timer Frida
Jakšić), is celebrating her ninth birthday, and the school
just got a brand-new gym thanks to the project of the town's corrupt
mayor (veteran stage and TV actor Željko Königsknecht)
and the "fortunate" timing of elections just around the
corner.
Vlado Mladinić (Milivoj
Beader), the man we saw wrapping the gift, is planning to
spend the day with Ana, who is his daughter. After his first attempt
at taking her out of class fails due to the intervention of the
school staff, he comes back with plan B: a hunting rifle in one hand
and a cake in the other. A divorced, desperate man left behind by
society, Vlado does a desperate thing: he takes Ana's class hostage.
As the situation develops, a number of interested parties join in, so
to speak. Besides the kids' parents and the police, there is also the
mayor, who seeks a political angle, and the fame-hungry journalist
from the local online newspaper, who tries to control a situation
that repeatedly gets out of control.
Vitez, by contrast,
manages to maintain perfect control over the material for most of the
film’s duration — not an easy task, since his ambitious script
juggles a lot of characters, each with their own well-established
points of view and agendas. Thanks to the director’s precise
direction and good sense of timing, his characters are rather evenly
developed and do not overstay their welcome on the screen. The
casting choices are also interesting and seem deliberate, as most of
the actors in both the main and the supporting cast play against
their usual type. Cinematographer Lutvo Mekić does
a very good job and the editing by Ivana Rogić is
faultless.
Slight problems occur in
the film’s conclusion. The ending itself could be a little tighter
and better motivated, with some of the plot threads simply getting
lost on the way. It feels as though the writer-director has simply
tried to touch on too many social issues — such as education, the
judicial and political system in Croatia, its endemic corruption, the
country’s history of war, diverging parenting methods, the rise of
right-wing rhetoric in public discourse, and so on. This was more of
an issue in Vitez's previous films, however; here, this profusion of
topics does not take as much of a toll on the film, since
Extracurricular remains a good, well-paced and precisely
executed genre piece.
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