previously published on Cineuropa
Serbian-Australian actress Bojana Novaković is widely-known for her work in television, as well as in Australian and Hollywood films, and people also know a thing or two about her highly-publicised past romances. Now, for the first time, she is testing her capabilities as a filmmaker with a documentary film inspired by the relationships within her own extended family. One could expect a strictly personal project, maybe even a proper artist’s ego trip, but The Forbidden Aunt truly transcends, and turns out to be something quite universal. The feature has just premiered in the documentary competition of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival.
The filmmaker’s starting point was an awkward situation she remembered from her childhood: her immediate family never let her spend too much time with one of her aunts, even though the woman had never harmed Bojana in any way and the filmmaker also remembers her as a fun person to be around. The reason for this attitude may have been aunt Gordana’s lifestyle, as she was what could be described as a bohemian. In an attempt to investigate the matter, Novaković goes back to Serbia in her hometown of Užice, where Gordana still lives, with the intention to make an easy-breezy documentary about her quirky aunt, who might be a bit foul-mouthed, but means no harm.
This is precisely what she appears like in the opening shot, where Gordana is giving her niece a lecture on the advantages of granny panties over g-strings. Also, she is the kind of person who is always happy to lend her neighbours a helping hand. Born the third daughter of a working-class family, she was never great at school, but she was a talented and inspired artist of a hairdresser who also loved to party in the company of men she easily fell for, and who did love a drink. Although her own children, Mladen and Marija, do not seem to hold any grudge against her, the truth is that their mother’s drinking was so excessive, and her behaviour so erratic, that they were basically left to fend for themselves as early as in their teenage years.
As soon as this is revealed, a breach is made which gradually opens, leading to a darker side of things, as the aforementioned destructive behaviour certainly had its reasons. Indeed, Gordana was an unwanted child, her “crime” being that she was a girl when her family expected a son. While her older sisters, Bojana’s mother Biljana and the family’s favourite, Mirjana, fared much better, Gordana was neglected. This childhood trauma caused by her parents later led, in adulthood, to her inflicting the same trauma to her own children, because hurt people hurt people.
The gesture of flipping one’s childhood memories upside down by digging into the darker side of one’s family’s past is not a particularly new one in documentary cinema – families always tend to harbour secrets and serve as battlefields for various conflicts between their members. The sincerity of the approach can help, but only so much. The thing with The Forbidden Aunt is that Bojana Novaković clearly sees a wider picture, but has enough discretion to refrain from using her family’s story as a metaphor of sorts for the Serbian and former Yugoslav society. Instead, she shows a lot of empathy for her aunt, possibly because she herself is no stranger to some of Gordana’s patterns of behaviour.
The special treat here is Novaković’s decision to listen to her aunt’s suggestion and insert a number of telenovela-style segments to re-enact moments of the family’s past, and to complement the rather scarce archive material and the newly filmed footage (of varying quality), shot by the filmmaker herself under varying conditions, which form the rest of the movie. The soap opera scenes, where Novaković plays both herself and Gordana alongside both professional actors and non-actors, serve the film quite well, due to Dušan Grubin’s lensing and Milica Kolarić’s inspired costumes. Thanks to these segments, The Forbidden Aunt feel a bit less like a necessary, but still very bitter pill to swallow.
No comments:
Post a Comment