A Film a Week - Fiume o Morte!

 previously published on Cineuropa

Rijeka is now the third-largest city in Croatia, a somewhat popular yet unorthodox tourist destination that combines a sun-and-sea appeal with a unique industrial and alternative cultural heritage. However, the fact that, during the 20th century, it existed within the framework of eight or nine different countries is something often neglected even by its most knowledgeable inhabitants. Some of those vignettes from history are quite unusual cases even by global historical standards.

One of those “governments” stands firmly in the centre of Igor Bezinović’s sophomore feature-length work, Fiume o morte!, which has just premiered in the Tiger Competition at IFFR. With it, the Rijeka-born filmmaker comes back to the ground he has already visited twice, with his short An Encounter (2009) back in 2010 and with his debut feature A Brief Excursion (2017) that screened in the Bright Future section.

The title is actually the battle cry of the “desperate” Italian soldiers lead by the controversial poet and war veteran Gabriele D’Annunzio, who took control over the city whose status was a matter of dispute between the kingdoms of Italy and Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the First World War. He ruled over it over the course of 16 months, between the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1921. His reign was quite eclectic and even esoteric, laced with numerous paradoxes between the proclaimed newly founded personal freedoms and the fact that it served as a sort of inspiration for another “warrior poet”, Benito Mussolini, to forge fascism. Needles to say, it attracted many colourful characters from all over the world, but mainly from Italy, before it was formally cancelled by the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo and actually, some months later, by the intervention of the regular Italian Army that granted the establishment of the independent city state which also did not last for very long, since fascist forces occupied it again in 1924.

Bezinović sets on a journey to reenact the details of D’Annunzio’s rule over the city, now largely forgotten. For that, he relied on rich archival material consisting of over 10,000 photos and some film footage from that period. However, Fiume or morte! is not a simple dramatic reconstruction of a historical period, as the filmmaker gets to the meta-level of explaining his creative process, especially the casting of non-professional actors to play the roles of D’Annunzio (seven of them and for various reasons, from their physical resemblance to their ability to speak proper Italian) and others (also picked for their specific abilities varying from martial arts practice, rock climbing and proficient swimming to the ability to speak the local “Fiumano” dialect) in order to replay some of the moments recorded on the photographs. Lastly, the filmmaker tries and manages to open a dialogue with our present times.

He does so by making interesting artistic choices, like highlighting discrepancies: the costumes designed by Tajči Čekada and Manuela Paladin are period-accurate, the production designers Antonio Spazzapan and Tizianna de Mario also try to reenact the period, while the locations cannot be stripped of their contemporary qualities. The same goes also for the mixture of historic and contemporary props that sometimes play to humorous effect. Evocatively lensed by Gregor Božič and smoothly edited by Hrvoslava Brkušić, Fiume o morte! is a slick piece of filmmaking that reminds us that, although the items of “legacy” of a certain period might not always be on display, the dark or crazy past is never too far away.

A Film a Week - A Brief Excursion / Kratki izlet

From the description, A Brief Excursion, the first fiction feature by Croatian director Igor Bezinović whose career consists of several documentaries and shorts, seems like a small movie that will attract big labels like “existential”, “artistic”, “meditative” and so on. It follows the group of characters trying to reach an elusive medieval church and see its frescoes that transforms into a journey to a proverbial heart of darkness for each one of them. The film premiered in Rotterdam’s Bright Future selection and met some favorable reviews, so some more festival exposure is likely and it will hit the home turf in Pula and Motovun, but the hopes for some kind of regular distribution, especially abroad, might seem too optimistic.

Still, its modest budget, guerrilla-style shooting against the backdrop of a well-known party destination Motovun Film Festival and the cast of mostly non-professional actors playing the semi-fictionous versions of themselves (all of them are kinda-sorta recognizable faces from the nightlife scene of country’s capital Zagreb) might seem as a gimmick, but it is not, for the most of the time. It is also an adaptation of a well-known short novel by Antun Šoljan that is the part of Croatian high-school curriculum, already adapted by the same filmmaker into his short A Very Brief Excursion (2014), but not in the straight, expected way. It is more faithful to Šoljan’s spirit, style and themes it dwells on than to the chain of real and surreal events it is portraying.

Stola (Bezinović’s co-writer Ante Zlatko Stolica) is our guide and unreliable narrator that tells the story from his memories presumably some years after the events, so some details are not in the right place. Back then, he was an aimless 20-something, probably a student trying to figure out what to do with his life while partying with like-minded proto-hipster people over the course of one summer that might change everything. His almost legendary friend Roko (Mladen Vujčić) proposes the excursion to the monastery ruins near the place called Gradina (which can be anywhere and clearly symbolises the Utopia), and two of them spend the night convincing a group of people to join them.

But the excursion does not go as planned: the bus breaks down and the crew of seven people continue their trip on foot, not exactly sure where they are going. As they are going on and on, things around them are getting more and more peculiar and hikers one by one drop out of the crew for some strange reasons. Do the ruins and the frescoes really exist? Are the young people completely lost? Is it all a dream? Is it all about the journey and not the destination, as the cliché suggests?

Some parallels could be drawn to Andrea Arnold’s masterpiece American Honey, even though Bezinović’s film was shot before Arnold’s came out. The theme is similar, the aimlessness is kinda inherent for young people trying to figure out their own way in the game called life, regardless of someone’s socio-economic status. The other thing is hedonism and partying that rarely breaks the sub-cultural frames. And finally, Bezinović and Arnold both employ some documentarian techniques in their work.

The differences between the two films are notable, though. While Arnold’s characters come from the skid row milieu of American Midwest, Bezinović’s are middle-class to well-off urbanites, more spirited and spiritual. Their hedonism, even though totally within the rigid hipster frame, seems more genuine than Coca-Cola commercial-like parties in American Honey. The type of documentarism is also different, Bezinović shows more emotion towards his characters by keeping the camera fluidly moving around them in close vicinity, trading the grandeur of the statement for audio-visual poetry, while Arnold’s approach is more epic.

A Brief Excursion is not that much about the youth nowadays as it is going for universal, eternal questions of growing up, developing intellectually and spiritually, friendship and the relationship between the journey and the destination, the process and the goal. The source novel was first published in the 60‘s, in socialist Yugoslavia and through it Šoljan was examining the laziness and lack of motivation and courage to confront the authoritarian regime in the search of personal freedom and happiness. Fifty years later, the country and the regime are long gone, the new social frame is also more or less rigid and the revolution (that might be started from a bed, like in Oasis’ song) or a better world still seem like a futile dream.

Modest in the terms of budget, but with a rich and layered story and character development and very detailed in execution, A Brief Excursion is a film worth several viewings over the course of years. Small, but brilliant touches like the slight differences between the text spoken by the narrator and the picture seen on the screen and the sound design in which the ambiental sounds are mixed with occasional bursts of minimal ethno score could pass under the radar. While not necessarily being a masterpiece, A Brief Excursion is more than a sure-handed debut. It is pretty impressive.