A Film a Week - Mother Mara / Majka Mara

 previously published on Cineuropa

Films centred on women of a certain age are not that common in Serbian cinema, and those that look at things from a distinctive, feminine perspective are even rarer. However, actress-turned-filmmaker Mirjana Karanović (of Esma’s Song fame) has decided to forge her filmmaking career with exactly this kind of movie. Her first directorial effort, A Good Wife (2016), in which she told the story of a woman who has to face up to her husband’s involvement in war crimes during the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia, made quite a splash on the festival circuit after its world premiere at Sundance. Her sophomore film, Mother Mara, has just premiered as an out-of-competition gala at Sarajevo.

The titular protagonist, played by the filmmaker herself, has just lost her son Nemanja (Pavle Čemerikić in flashbacks and short mobile phone-shot inserts), who was the apple of her eye. Mara raised him as a single mother, while also building a career as a corporate lawyer, and now, everybody from the ranks of her family and friends both at and after the funeral reminds her that she is left with nothing to live for. Since the stern Mara is not exactly the crying type, she tries to overcome her muted grief by returning to work.

There, a young man called Milan (Vučić Perović, mainly seen on Serbian TV) insists on her representing him in a routine probate case. Although this type of case is something more suitable for a junior lawyer at Mara’s firm, Milan has a strong argument: he knew the part of Nemanja’s life that was hidden from his mother, the gym sessions and the wild nights out in the floating river clubs in Belgrade. The strictly professional relationship between the middle-aged woman and the man, who is one generation younger than her, turns personal, carnal and romantic, placing Mara in a completely new situation.

As an actress, Karanović has a commanding screen presence, and she is quite expressive both in the muted and in the more vocal parts of her role, and the chemistry she shares with Perović is compellingly awkward, as is usually the case in slightly repressed cultures where many things are still taboo. The presence of regionally recognisable actors such as Boris Isaković (Karanović’s acting partner in A Good Wife), Jasna Žalica (recently seen in May Labour Day) and Alen Liverić (of No One’s Son fame) in supporting roles also works in the film’s favour.

Karanović has also developed a certain style as a director, based on intriguing and clear ideas, such as the camerawork by Igor Marović corresponding with the protagonist’s current state of mind, with the symmetrically arranged, static shots (usually taken from mid-to-long distance) and the more dynamic, hand-held ones both having their respective functions. The centrepiece scenes also look good, thanks to Lazar Predojev’s methodical editing. Production designer Dragana Baćović should also be commended for her work, since the sterile coldness of the sets corresponds with Mara’s milieu and her personality (or at least the façade of it), and the same goes for the discreet score composed by Ephrem Lüchinger.

Relying on the help of her co-writers Maja Pelević and Ognjen Sviličić, as well as Darko Lungulov, who is credited as a creative consultant, Karanović has made Mother Mara as a solid, controlled and well-thought-out piece of contemporary cinema. However, the lack of proverbial “dirt” in it sometimes makes it seem a tad too “doctored” to be heartfelt.

A Film a Week - Sweet Simona / Slatka Simona

 previously published on Cineuropa

The rules of the “game” are simple: lonely clients send text messages to chat with online sex workers, and the workers’ goal is to hold the clients’ interest in order for the chat to last as long as possible. The “product” they sell in this role-playing business is not sex, per se, but rather illusions and fantasies. Theoretically, the clients should have learned the rules or at least realised that it is a game by now, since the phone and online sex business is not really that new. But what happens when the human factor intervenes?

This is the question posed by Croatian filmmaker Igor Mirković – best known for his work on shorts, documentaries and TV series, as well as his debut fiction feature, Night Boats (2012) – in his sophomore feature fiction film, Sweet Simona. This erotic drama-thriller, produced by Ivan Maloča’s Interfilm, is hitting domestic cinemas now, distributed by Duplicato Media.

A lonely, Austrian-based cab driver called Bobo (character actor Jerko Marčić) falls hard for a chat girl who has introduced herself as Sweet Simona. His obsession with her gets so extreme that he sees her everywhere – in a local young woman who works at the dry-clean service, and even in a boutique mannequin – and his delusions are further fuelled by the notion that she sometimes visits his town, as stated by her in the chat. But, despite Simona taking a certain form (that of actress Maja Jurić, best known for her award-winning performance in François Lunel’s Those Dark Nights) in Bobo’s fantasies, she does not actually exist.

Sweet Simona is an alias invented and used by Zeleni (Toma Medvešek, in his first major feature-film role), a down-on-his-luck young man who works as a sex-chat worker in an agency operated by Liza (Nela Kocsis) in a flat in central Zagreb. When we meet him, Zeleni (meaning “Green”) is at rock bottom: he has racked up a huge gambling debt and his girlfriend Dina (Nikolina Prkačin) has just left him, so his job is probably the only lifeline he has left. The almost exclusively male “landscape” of the agency is about to change when former nurse Jana (Tina Keserović, glimpsed in Barbara Albert’s Mademoiselle Paradis) comes to work with them. But her more humane ideas about the “business” might prove to be dangerous for the agency, the employees and the clients (such as Bobo) as well…

Sweet Simona is a very ambitious film that deals with a number of serious topics, ranging from internal, psychological ones, such as a sense of loneliness and one’s need for the illusion of being loved and needed, to more external ones, such as relationships in the workplace, exploitation, and the “centre” and the periphery, all handsomely packaged into the erotic-thriller genre. This task seems even harder bearing in mind that the film has four protagonists that are equally important for its complicated story, and at least as many supporting characters that are crucial in driving the narrative forward.

At first, Mirković masterfully conducts the whole thing, relying on the perfectly nuanced acting by the cast members (who are not recognised as stars but who work well as an ensemble), the suggestive, neon-lit design, the occasional infusions of sexy sleaze, and the very thin lines between imagination and reality, all executed to perfection through Ivan Zadro’s cinematography and the editing by Tomislav Pavlic. However, the film loses some of its momentum and ability to grip the viewer towards the end, since the stakes get higher and higher, making the solutions seem more and more provisional and rushed. Nevertheless, Sweet Simona is a fine example of cinema with wide appeal that could easily attract audiences internationally as well as locally.