It is 10:36 on a Friday morning in 1992 when an unexpected phone call disrupts the continuity of everyday life. A wall clock can be seen in close-up, its hands marking the exact time, while a gentle voice-over narrator adds that this scene took place in an unnamed country that no longer exists, except in the books, films, and memories of those who were born there before 1995.
From the very beginning of her second feature-length film, director Iva Radivojević creates an aesthetic tension between the indexical aspect of the cinematic image and the associative movements of thought that enable it to be embedded in a carefully considered audiovisual montage.
When the phone rang that day and eleven-year-old Lana (Natalija Ilinčić) picked up the receiver, she learned of the sudden death of her grandfather, who had died of a heart attack. She will remember this incisive moment for many years to come, explains the narrator. However, all the events surrounding it remain in a strange fog. Between the traumatic call and its diffuse reverberations, a very peculiar time of obsessive repetition unfolds. Returning ten times to the opening image of the wall clock, the film uses it as a starting point to tell different episodes from Lana’s life before the outbreak of the Yugoslavian war, all of which end with her family fleeing to neighboring Bulgaria. Iva Radivojević has a very precise sense for the psychological mechanisms that result from social breakdowns caused by war and displacement—she herself had to leave her Serbian homeland as a child at the start of the war.
At the same time, she succeeds in translating the complexity of the associated experiences into an aesthetic form that transcends both the personal story and the historical situation. Three years lie between the death of her grandfather and the outbreak of war; still they somehow overlap. While the first event can be recalled and has relatively clear contours, the seething violence in a country immediately before the war is much more difficult to grasp and its consequences are brutally incomprehensible. The ringing of the telephone functions like a screen memory in the psychoanalytical sense, which, slightly shifted, refers to a latent traumatic complex. Iva Radivojević’s film becomes itself a mental space for working through long-lost memories and unrealized losses.
The contrast between the rigor of the resulting formal concept and the poetic beauty and associative openness with which it operates on the visual and sound level is fascinating all the way.
This also stems from the outstanding work of cinematographer Martin DiCicco and his sensitivity to the hors-champ. Close-ups are often framed in such a way that they create a sensory intensity and at the same time refer to an outside of the image, which prefigures absence and loss. In addition, there are haunting shots of an anonymous city that is only once identified as Novi Sad by a sign. They show a kind of calm before the storm, which announces itself in casual observations: dead cats hanging in the trees of the neighborhood, Lana’s parents arming themselves, radio snippets of news about gasoline shortages, inflation, and embargo.
The young girl accepts these signs of the times without being able to categorize them. Her priorities are different anyway. She plays the piano for her friends over the phone, chases people from the housing estate with the little boy next door for fun, and listens to energetic Yugo rock with her sister’s wild classmate in front of the TV. Such scenes also develop great intensity and presence thanks to the well-considered and detailed set design, which is repeatedly interrupted and punctuated by the melancholic narrator
A cheerful moment with a lively friend is suddenly transformed into mourning work when the voice accompanying those images articulates that it was only this last moment together that will remain as a memory of the girl. During the whole film, the voice-over functions as a ghostly phenomenon that brings disparate experiences into contact without dissolving them. Disembodied and thus deprived of precise localization, it hovers between past and future, the third and first person, a mode of external observation and internal experience. Iva Radivojević succeeds in creating an experimental and touching film essay that oscillates between the personal, the intimate, and the universal in an extraordinary, beautiful way.
Silvia Bahl
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2024