A Film a Week - This Is Not a Love Song / Šlager

 previously published on Cineuropa

Nevio Marasović is back at the Pula Film Festival for the world premiere of his newest film, This Is Not a Love Song, only one year after the premiere of his previous effort, Good Times, Bad Times. That previous movie was a risky, brave affair, filmed in a single location with a large number of actors playing the same characters in different situations and at different stages of life, but the risk paid off. This Is Not a Love Song shares some of the traits of its predecessor, namely its compact length of 71 minutes, its single location (apart from the prologue, the epilogue and the faux home-video interludes) and the fact that it is also dialogue-driven. Topic-wise, however, this latest film is closer to Marasović's lauded sophomore feature, Vis-à-Vis (2013).

Niko (Janko Popović Volarić, Marasović’s regular since Vis-à-Vis) used to be a promising young filmmaker, since his debut Schlager (which, in its Croatian transcription "Šlager", is also the original title of this film), made in collaboration with his then-girlfriend Sara (Lana Barić of Ágnes Koscsis’ Eden and Danilo Šerbedžija’s Tereza37 fame) reaped many awards on the festival circuit. His subsequent films never repeated the success of the first one and he ended up directing commercials for a living. Stuck in a creative block, he takes a long trip from Vienna to Zagreb on a bicycle, but suffers an accident in which he breaks his knee and ends up in a spa hotel in the Slovenian tourist town of Bled for several months of recovery. There, he writes a script about his and Sara's relationship, sends it to her and invites her over to hear her feedback, hoping they might rekindle their chemistry, at least on the creative level. 

What ensues are three acts of bickering about who wronged whom and how, sincere confessions to clear the air, and the formation of a new relationship between them that threatens to echo the previous one, occasionally intercut with excerpts of a home video showing Niko back in the day, trying to record a video-message to present Schlager at a film festival in Japan, through which we learn that although he may have directed the film, it was Sara who directed him. This footage is followed by an epilogue, set against the backdrop of the 2022 edition of the Pula Film Festival, which reveals how things eventually turned out between them.

The creative block was Marasović's preferred issue to deal with both in Vis-à-Vis and in Comic Sans (2018), so This Is Not a Love Song may function as a sequel of sorts. The filmmaker's method is also similar, at least in terms of writing, since he co-wrote the script with both actors, who were involved in the creation of their characters right from the start. This translates into lived-in performances that touch deep emotions, but never go overboard into the territory of over-acting. 

Marasović's approach to directing is quite serviceable and not too flashy; the series of reverse shots interrupted by interludes and a lovely montage sequence work beautifully, as does Radoslav Jovanov Gonzo’s cinematography, usually in shallow focus, which, counter-intuitively, blurs the locations in order to point all of our attention on the actors, the characters they play, and the relationships between them. The attention Marasović pays to music in his films is also commendable, and here the amalgam between the gentle score by Alen and Nenad Sinkauz and Slovenian and Croatian easy-listening “schlagers” serves the film perfectly.