A Film a Week - Beautiful Lovely People / Lijepi i dragi ljudi

 previously published on Cineuropa

Although, as a filmmaker, Igor Mirković has tried his hand at many types and formats of cinema, such as short and feature-length fiction films, as well as long-running TV series, it seems that he feels most at home with documentaries, given that New Time (2001) and Happy Child (2003) are regarded as the best works of his career. His newest foray into documentary filmmaking, Beautiful Lovely People, comes only a couple of months after the release of his latest fiction feature, Sweet Simona [+], and the two movies have a couple of things in common. Both were prepared over an extensive period of time, and both, at least tangentially, deal with the notion of our times and our lives changing because of the influence of technology. Beautiful Lovely People has just premiered in the regional competition of ZagrebDox.

The protagonist, Šime Strikoman, is a small-town photographer who invented the concept of Millennium Photography. At first, this was just a simple series of large-scale photos taken at the turn of the millennium, but the concept evolved and widened quickly to encompass photographing, for instance, all of the members of a certain generation in a certain town, visitors at different festivities, participants and followers of certain traditions, fans of a certain football club celebrating its 100th anniversary, fans of Croatian national teams from different sports celebrating their successes, and even such oddities as a chain of fishing boats crossing a stretch of water from the mainland to one of the islands. All of his photos are composed beautifully, arranged with care and usually taken from a crane or, in extreme cases, from a helicopter.

Šime is something of a local hero and a national curiosity, so he has some devoted followers whom we are about to meet in Mirković’s documentary. His wife, Edita, is his most loyal sidekick. His neighbour Pero is the record holder for the number of Millennium Photos he appears in. Cezar serves as the master of ceremonies, Željka is the chronicler of the project, while marketing expert Professor Gardijan puts it into the context of our rapidly changing world.

Šime expresses an ambition to transcend national borders and try to promote the concept, for instance, in Pamplona, around its traditional bull run, but the passing of time presents new challenges while also offering new inspiration.

Presented like this, filmed in usually warm, clear, summery colours by cinematographer Silvestar Kolbas, and accompanied by music of different genres, with a predominance of folk beats and pop tunes, one might assume that Beautiful Lovely People is a calculated piece of nostalgia cinema laced with some common nuggets of everyday “philosophy” about time passing by too quickly and making us feel obsolete. While it does feel light-hearted and does not outstay its welcome (thanks to Iva Ivan’s tight editing), Mirković still manages to weave in some more complex questions about times changing and traditions being created, followed, abandoned and revived (sometimes quite purposefully).

The most intriguing details of this documentary are probably the “Easter eggs” that may be spotted only by those who are acquainted with Croatian politics. These insights lead us to ponder whether those beautiful, lovely (and deluded) people, and their traditions, are really that beautiful and lovely after all – and if not, whether they could ever be made to be that way.

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.