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.

A Film a Week - Good Times, Bad Times / Pamtim samo sretne dane

 previously published on Cineuropa

“Expect the unexpected” would serve as a suitable piece of advice for a viewer readying themselves to watch a movie by Croatian filmmaker Nevio Marasović, who tends to take risks with his playful approach to established film genres. His newest work, Good Times, Bad Times, which enjoyed its world premiere in the national competition at Pula before going on a festival tour, continues exploring relationships between fathers and sons, which was the main topic of his previous effort, Comic Sans (2018), adopting an unapologetic cinematic worldview similar to that found in classical American melodramas. For this reason and for its clever structuring, this might be his best work to date, but an ironic twist of fate – the lead actor in a film about waiting for death actually dying before the premiere – gave the movie another layer of poignancy.

The actor in the spotlight here, Slovenian thesp Radko Polič Rac (to whom the film is dedicated), plays an old man, Hrvoje Kasum, who comes to a restaurant on what seems like a regular visit. He is offered wine and brandy by a waitress, which he accepts, before going outside to smoke a cigar. There, another waiter (Stjepan Perić) approaches him and offers him the same things, which the elderly gentleman accepts, before he starts observing the other visitors to the restaurant: a young couple on their first date, another couple of soon-to-be parents, some young families, a few broken families dealing with emotional trauma, a politician giving a motivational speech to his “apostles”, a few father-son pairings and so on.

Kasum does not interact with them, but both he and the people he observes interact with the waiter and the chef/restaurant owner (European Film Award winner Zlatko Burić). It seems that all of them and their individual stories captured at this particular moment in time are somehow connected to a singular story of betrayal and that, more specifically, they happen to be linked through the restaurant and its staff. The sounds of a football match blaring from a largely off-screen TV halfway through the film’s compact 72-minute running time might serve as a dead giveaway.

Good Times, Bad Times is a risky affair in almost every respect, from its confinement to a limited number of locations, to its extended cast consisting of pretty much the whole upper crust of the Croatian acting scene (including Marasović’s frequent collaborator Janko Popović Volarić), with all of these actors having only brief screen time to show what they are capable of, to the fact that Polič gets pretty much sidelined and relegated to the role of an observer for the whole middle section of the film. However, the risk has paid off thanks to Marasović’s ingenious approach to directing actors in bit roles, keeping them deliberately in the dark about the movie as a whole, and the polar opposite treatment he gives to the lead and the two supporting actors, who show a considerable amount of chemistry in their interplay, with Polič enjoying the opportunity to make an impressive swan song.

In the technical department, cinematographer Damir Kudin does his best to open up the confined spaces and make them look larger, while editor Tomislav Pavlic keeps up the rhythm and the dynamism in a film that could easily have ended up disjointed. Furthermore, the perfect match between Alen and Nenad Sinkauz’s original score and the theme songs by Arsen Dedić and Gabi Novak fine-tunes viewers’ emotions. Serving up a good chunk of mystery in the beginning and a purely emotional experience by the end, Good Times, Bad Times shows us the filmmaker behind it in the best possible light.

A Film a Week - Comic Sans

previously published on Cineuropa

It seems there is a pattern to Croatian director Nevio Marasović’s filmmaking, in which after a brave and innovative (though sometimes out-of-control) piece of genre cinema comes a somewhat more conventional, yet very original, dramedy. After Goran, a snowy thriller with a distinctive absurdist and darkly humorous Coen brothers vibe to it, he is back with Comic Sans, which world-premiered in the regional competition at Belgrade FEST, winning the “Nebojša Đukelić” Award for Best Film to boot. It will hit theatres domestically later in March. The Croatian director, working with the script he co-wrote with Rakan Rushaidat and lead actor Janko Popović Volarić, tackles the topics of relationships and break-ups, snobbery, family relations and the search for inner peace. If the title seems oddly familiar in the context of Marasović’s work, there is a reason for it: Comic Sans was the title of the film within the film in Vis-à-vis.

The story, however, starts off in Zagreb, with an awkward post-break-up meeting between an overworked but successful designer, Alan (Popović Volarić, collaborating with the director for the third time, after Vis-à-vis and Goran), and his ex-girlfriend Marina (the ever-excellent Nataša Janjić, known for the role of Lina in Goran), which leads to clumsy but passionate make-up sex. The next day, Marina leaves the apartment before Alan gets up and subsequently does not answer her phone. Alan and his co-worker Lukas (Serbian actor Miloš Timotijević, of Humidity and No One’s Child fame) are about to botch an important job for their Slovenian employers, and Alan is losing his mind over the situation with Marina. After they meet again and she explains that it was all a mistake, the chaos in Alan’s head explodes, with disastrous consequences. His only way out is a retreat to the island of Vis with his father, Bruno (legendary Croatian-Danish actor Zlatko Burić, from the Pusher trilogy), an artist with whom he has some long-standing issues. What Alan does not know is that another of his exes, Barbara (Inti Sraj), is also on the island, together with her new fiancé, Peter (Miha Rodman).

At first, it seems that Comic Sans takes too much time to get its story under way, but it is merely a matter of expectations. A viewer trained in standard-issue comedy-dramas will be surprised that the trip to the island, with most of the island tropes found in Croatian cinema, happens only halfway through, so the change that Alan is bound to undergo has to be rushed. The trick is that Comic Sans is not one of these bog-standard comedy-dramas in which the protagonist gains a new perspective and changes his life completely in a matter of days. Yes, Alan will see things in a new light and some changes will occur, but they will be slighter and slower because the transformation has to overcome Alan’s ego, snobbery and long-standing patterns of behaviour.

What works perfectly in Comic Sans, apart from the title with more than one meaning, explored over the course of the film, is the actors’ interplay. Janko Popović Volarić and Zlatko Burić channel the energy of the troubled father-son relationship in a way that is both serious and humorous. They are both more-than-accomplished actors, and Marasović uses them well. That goes especially for Popović Volarić, who has to share the screen with a strong actress such as Nataša Janjić and with the slightly subdued but menacing alpha-male presence of Miloš Timotijević.

The cinematography by Marasović’s regular DoP, Damir Kudin, is also top-notch. Tasked with creating a mood that fits Alan’s character in corporate offices in Zagreb and Ljubljana, and his “creatively messy” flat, and then shifting it completely to the low-season island, Kudin does a great job of finding just the right nuance and not over-playing with clichéd images. The same goes for the repeated use of a kitschy pop ballad by Mišo Kovač as a theme song right from the start, which might seem an obvious choice, but that tune also adds a layer or two to Alan’s character.