A Film a Week - Otter / Vidra

 previously published on Cineuropa

The kids are not okay. Or, in other words, we do not know whether they are or are not, because we live in two different worlds. The best we can do is to pass down our own “wisdom” and experiences to them, hoping they will mean something in their world, and to encourage them to have and pursue an agenda that might differ from our own.

A teenager pressured by the problems coming from both worlds stands at the centre of Srđan Vuletić’s newest film, Otter, the first shown in the main competition of this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival. Only a week later, Otter will move on to open the Herceg Novi Film Festival in Montenegro, and other festivals, either in the region or in the youth-films niche, could follow suit.

Our protagonist, Hana (newcomer Maša Drašler), usually does what she is told. She cannot express any interest in the pseudo-celebrity guy from her school, Balša (Savin Perišić), as her friends deem his podcast partner, the self-centred bodybuilder Luka (Pavle Marković), hotter. At home, she feels neglected by her mother, Olga (Nada Vukčević, glimpsed in How I Was Stolen by the Germans), who devotes her time to caring for Hana’s dying father.

Hana is completely out of luck, as her first intended date with Balša coincides with the day of her father’s death. After witnessing her mother submitting to the influence of the father’s brother (Serbian actor Marko Janketić), who thinks that the dying man’s last wish (to be buried in a space suit, as he was a pilot who dreamt of space flight) is silly and blasphemous, Hana sneaks away from the flat to meet with Balša and Luka, and to go with them on a trip to the lake to watch and film the solar eclipse.

The trip does not go as planned, and owing to the boys’ fragile egos, a circle of jealousy and insecurity between the three of them emerges. For the first time in her life, Hana has to make a decision and take action, even if it means defying figures of authority in a patriarchal and traditional environment such as Montenegro, where the film is set, and breaking the rules regarding the roles imposed on her as a woman and a young person by family and society.

At the beginning of the film, Vuletić shows his class as a director, since he manages to achieve a rare thing in today’s movies: the young characters are “allowed” to appear, sound and act like authentic teenagers. On top of that, he uses Filip Tot’s camerawork, Vladimir Gojun’s expectedly sure-handed editing, and the moody, ethereal electronic original music by Giorgio Giampà and Marta Cucchesini as pieces of a puzzle intended to leave a pretty strong impression.

However, halfway through, the characters’ actions, some of them drastic, start feeling abrupt, lacking proper motivation and appearing not so well timed. The source of the problem might be found in cutting some of the original script by Stefan Bošković (who made his name on TV both in Montenegro and in Serbia), or maybe in the young actors’ limited experience. Once the emotional stakes for them get higher, Vuletić somehow loses control, and the film becomes a bit chaotic.

On the other hand, that kind of chaos is significant both for the teenagers’ inner lives and for life itself, so, in the end, Otter, whose title comes from a scene depicting Hana’s ultimate cognition that she has to stand up for herself, can pass as more of an introspective movie. Ultimately, it motivates viewers to get introspective as well.

A Film a Week - Gym

 previously published on Cineuropa

Some 20 years ago, it seemed like the cinema of Bosnia and Herzegovina was enjoying a boom, and Srđan Vuletić was one of the torchbearers after the success of his 2003 debut feature, Summer in the Golden Valley, which won the Tiger Award at IFFR the following year. Now, it has been 17 years since Vuletić’s second film, It’s Hard to Be Nice, and finally, we can see his third effort, Gym. The venue for the premieres of all three of Vuletić’s features has been the same: the Sarajevo Film Festival. This time, his movie is part of the Open Air programme.

Gym is a film with which its writer-director (working from a story by Mirela Tepanić-Grbešić) tries to explore the well-known, yet frustrating, situation in which a loud and aggressive minority manages to subdue the quiet majority. Vuletić attempts to do so by mixing the notions of situational comedy and social-realist drama with some twists and turns that veer towards a thriller, using one particular event as the stage for his intended metaphor.

The event in question is a banquet organised to celebrate the launch of a new telephone helpline aimed at solving ecological problems, and our point of view is that of the employees of the small firm in charge of the catering. Led by the boss, Damir, who is still torn between whether to close his firm owing to slow business or whether to keep on fighting in the hope of better times to come, the company is also the scene of a power struggle between the crazy, aggressive and offensive Ado (Dino Sarija), and his calmer and smarter brother-in-law, Riki (Edin Avdagić).

The source of the discord between them are their opposing attitudes towards their former colleague and the boss’s ex-girlfriend, Melisa (Dina Mušanović), who went on to found her own business. Ado’s plan is to beat Melisa into submission, quite literally, while Riki reasons that she had every right to try to strike it lucky on her own. The rest of the crew is rationally with Riki, but they are not willing to take a stand against the crazy Ado. And when the Chekhov’s gun appears by the end of the first act, we can be sure that it is going to go off by the end of the third.

Most of the problems with Gym stem from the notion that Vuletić has lost touch with the medium of cinema, since he spent a prolonged period teaching and working on TV-series projects. Although the initial situation and the basic characterisation are established pretty quickly, Vuletić takes his sweet time with the exposition and drags it out to the two-thirds mark of the film’s merciful 84-minute running time. In that regard, it seems like an extended pilot of a semi-ambitious TV show that tries to blend sitcom driven by local humour with social-realist and critical undertones concerning the hardships of young, working-class people in contemporary Bosnia.

The fact that it is pretty much set in a single location and has minimal production design also suggests a modest budget and/or production values, rather than some intended realism. The same could be said for Darko Herič’s cinematography, the digital crispness of which could serve better on smaller screens, rather than big ones, while Željko Šošić’s editing could have been smoother.

Gym is a stellar example of a piece of work whose noble intentions are hampered by bloated literary, didactic and preaching ambitions, compounded by a flawed, unspectacular execution. It’s a pity that even the central metaphor is relegated to the sidelines for such a long chunk of the running time.