previously published on Cineuropa
For a country with such a modest film output, quantitively speaking, Slovenia has a relatively long tradition of making independently produced films. Those movies might not always have been successful on the festival circuit or with international arthouse audiences, but they tend to fare better with a domestic crowd, attracting large numbers of viewers to movie theatres.
It might be significant that the director of the newest Slovenian indie crowd-pleasing comedy Something Sweet, Tin Vodopivec, started his film career as a production assistant on one of the most prominent Slovenian indies, Mitja Okorn’s Here and There (2004). In the meantime, Vodopivec has made a name for himself mostly as a stand-up comedian, so he teamed up with his partner, singer-songwriter and radio/TV presenter Urška Majdič, and assembled a cast of regionally well-known colleagues for his directorial feature debut. Having already racked up decent numbers domestically, it went into theatrical distribution abroad in neighbouring Croatia, with the potential to widen its reach to the whole region of the former Yugoslavia, and even countries all over the world with a significant Yugoslav diaspora.
The film opens with a parallel montage of a TV show host in North Macedonia making an introduction for and announcing his guest, the internationally acclaimed marketing guru Ace Majstorovski, and Ace (Macedonian-Slovenian actor and stand-up comedian Saško Kocev) himself having sex with a fan backstage. In the next scene, we meet another protagonist, a Ljubljana-based freelance event organiser called Kaja (Bosnian-Macedonian actress Jelena Jovanova), who sleeps in her car. Her ticket out of poverty is the event she is currently handling: Ace’s master class in one of the finest hotels in Ljubljana.
With Ace being late and even missing his plane, and Kaja sending goofy driver Neša (Serbian stand-up comedian Nikola Silić) to pick him up and drive him from Skopje to Ljubljana, she still has to improvise in order to keep her boss (Oriana Girotto) happy and her suspicious colleague/rival (Ula Furlan) at bay. When she notices that a hotel bartender, Gogi (also played by Kocev, this time with glasses and unkempt hair), is the spitting image of Ace, she gets the idea of making Gogi pose as Ace until the real guru shows up. With mess-ups on the road for one part of the gang and mess-ups with the flawed event organisation for the other, viewers will be treated to a few laughs and even a hint of romance blossoming between Kaja and Gogi.
The premise of deliberately mistaken identities is fairly standard for a screwball comedy, and Vodopivec tries his best not to mess it up. When he trusts his cast in front of the camera and lets them improvise, as well as the crew behind it, he does a decent job. The trouble arises when he decides to intervene with more attitude than actual experience in such things. Some examples of this are when he instructs editor Miha Šubic to employ some abrupt, quasi-jump cuts to ramp up the tension or use prolonged screen blackouts to highlight the significance of certain moments, or when he lets the score written by co-writer and composer Majdič and Leon First play in endless loops as a backdrop. The biggest problem, however, is the scriptwriting, with Vodopivec and Majdič sticking to the basics of shorter, TV-friendly scenes, relying too heavily on sketch logic and verbal and physical gags, while trying to connect them all in a semi-meaningful narrative necessary for a feature film. On top of that, not every joke lands properly, and some fail miserably.
Nevertheless, the breeziness of the picture as a whole and the presence of comedians from all over the region, as well as the naturalistic treatment of the differences in language and senses of humour, should please audiences from Slovenia to North Macedonia. After all, Vodopivec made the film for them, and they might as well see it as something sweet.
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