SPLIT, Croatia -- Croatian director Vinko Bresan's "Will Not End There" ("Nije Kraj") is a colorful, at times moving yet ultimately unsatisfying love story set against ongoing Serb-Croat tensions. Despite incorporating what have become staple elements of many Balkan movies -- brash and violent men, vulgar and scantily clad women and festive gypsies -- the title will probably have a harder time traveling out of the former Yugoslavia, or off the festival circuit, than the director's previous films ("Marshal", "How the War Started on My Island").
"Will Not End There" opens with Djuro (Predrag Vusovic), a gypsy porn actor, commenting on how Serbs and Croats are overly complicated before he begins playing his nose, a twangy tune that runs through the film and quickly begins to grate.
Martin (Ivan Herceg) buys a porn DVD from a street vendor, tracks down its star Djuro and coerces the latter into helping him get co-star actress Desa (Nada Sargin). She lives in an alcoholic stupor in the Serbian capital, where her pimp/producer agrees to sell her for 30,000 euros. Martin comes up with the money illegally and takes her back to his apartment in Croatia to what appears to be a platonic arrangement as he asks nothing of her and justifies his actions even less.
Of course, there's a reason to all of the over-the-top antics and gypsy platitudes in the intentionally enigmatic prologue, which is explained as the film unfolds. It has to do with Martin's role in the death of Desa's husband, a Serbian officer, in the recent war. Thrown into the mix are Martin's former fellow soldiers, now petty criminals, who recognize Desa and want her dead before she eventually figures out who they are.
Sargin gives the most solid performance of the film. Adding depth to her role as a decent woman turned hooker/porn actress after tragedy struck, she is a reminder of how few male Balkan directors offer actresses multifaceted roles today. Unfortunately, Herceg is wooden throughout and offers little credibility as a man harboring a guilt-ridden love for years, although stage and screen star Vusovic is amusing as the super-endowed porn actor whose wife thinks he makes his living playing music in the west.
While the plot is compelling at moments, despite an uneven blend of comedy and drama, it gets tangled up in all the dangling threads of a mystery and revelation that ultimately detracts from a very human story at its core.
Production companies: InterFilm, Vans, HRT. Cast: Ivan Herceg, Nada Sargin, Predrag Vusovic, Drazen Kuhn, Damir Orlic, Leon Lucev, Mladen Vulic, Voja Brajovic. Director: Vinko Bresan. Screenwriters: Bresan, Mate Matisic, Franjo Mogus. Producer: Ivan Maloca. Director of Photography: Mogus. Production Designer: Mario Ivezic. Music: Mate Matisic. Costume designer: Zeljka Franulovic. Editor: Sandra Botica-Bresan. Running time: 108 minutes.
"Will Not End There" opens with Djuro (Predrag Vusovic), a gypsy porn actor, commenting on how Serbs and Croats are overly complicated before he begins playing his nose, a twangy tune that runs through the film and quickly begins to grate.
Martin (Ivan Herceg) buys a porn DVD from a street vendor, tracks down its star Djuro and coerces the latter into helping him get co-star actress Desa (Nada Sargin). She lives in an alcoholic stupor in the Serbian capital, where her pimp/producer agrees to sell her for 30,000 euros. Martin comes up with the money illegally and takes her back to his apartment in Croatia to what appears to be a platonic arrangement as he asks nothing of her and justifies his actions even less.
Of course, there's a reason to all of the over-the-top antics and gypsy platitudes in the intentionally enigmatic prologue, which is explained as the film unfolds. It has to do with Martin's role in the death of Desa's husband, a Serbian officer, in the recent war. Thrown into the mix are Martin's former fellow soldiers, now petty criminals, who recognize Desa and want her dead before she eventually figures out who they are.
Sargin gives the most solid performance of the film. Adding depth to her role as a decent woman turned hooker/porn actress after tragedy struck, she is a reminder of how few male Balkan directors offer actresses multifaceted roles today. Unfortunately, Herceg is wooden throughout and offers little credibility as a man harboring a guilt-ridden love for years, although stage and screen star Vusovic is amusing as the super-endowed porn actor whose wife thinks he makes his living playing music in the west.
While the plot is compelling at moments, despite an uneven blend of comedy and drama, it gets tangled up in all the dangling threads of a mystery and revelation that ultimately detracts from a very human story at its core.
Production companies: InterFilm, Vans, HRT. Cast: Ivan Herceg, Nada Sargin, Predrag Vusovic, Drazen Kuhn, Damir Orlic, Leon Lucev, Mladen Vulic, Voja Brajovic. Director: Vinko Bresan. Screenwriters: Bresan, Mate Matisic, Franjo Mogus. Producer: Ivan Maloca. Director of Photography: Mogus. Production Designer: Mario Ivezic. Music: Mate Matisic. Costume designer: Zeljka Franulovic. Editor: Sandra Botica-Bresan. Running time: 108 minutes.
- 6/17/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
BERLIN -- "Svjedoci" (Witnesses) is a masterful piece of storytelling that looks at events surrounding a murder and the possible execution of its only witness through various points of view. Croatian director Vinko Bresan, whose first two films were political satires, abandons irony here for an honest and emotional account of how war and ethnic hatred corrupt moral behavior. With top-notch production values, especially fluid and sharp-focused cinematography by Zivko Zalar, this Berlinale competition film makes an excellent candidate for art houses everywhere.
Bresan follows a recent filmmaking trend that eschews linear narration in favor of a fractured story wherein the same events are recounted from different viewpoints, letting motivations and back story gradually fill in a picture that is only completely clear in the film's final moments.
Bresan is being anything but trendy, however, as the multiple retellings underscore the movie's theme -- that everybody has reasons for behaving as he or she does. Episodes over a couple of days -- retold with subplots, digressions and seemingly minor characters along with flashbacks to a war raging nearby -- reveal a web of deceit that stems from desperation and despair.
Based on Jurica Pavicic's novel "Alabaster Sheep", which evidently did tell its story in a traditional narrative, the script by the novelist, director and cinematographer traces a murder and police investigation in a small town in Croatia near the front line of the civil war more than a decade ago. Fueled by alcohol, three Croatian soldiers try to plant a bomb at the home of a Serb alleged to be a smuggler and black marketer. Startled to find him home -- he is supposed to be away -- they are forced to shoot him. Then they discover a witness whom they capture and hide in a garage belonging to the mother of one soldier.
The mother (Mirjana Karanovic), who the next day must bury a husband who was killed at the front, enlists a political uncle to cover up the crime. An honest cop (Drazen Kuhn) and a female journalist (Alma Prica) launch separate investigations. Then a crippled soldier (Leon Lucev), the boyfriend of the journalist and the mother's elder son, returns home, and more secrets and lies spill out.
The different viewpoints reveal the interconnections of nearly everyone in the small town, a microcosm for what happened in Croatia, where terrible things occurred during the war and everyone, in a sense, bore witness to these crimes against humanity.
Bresan's superb cast plays these roles with arresting intensity. Life, once measured in months and years, during civil carnage now boils down to a matter of moments. Everything gets speeded up and frantic, yet by fracturing the narrative, Bresan succeeds in slowing things back down so we can appreciate the moral vacuum created by war.
The mother, the movie's initial focal point, struggles to hold her family together. But as the movie continues to shift viewpoints, the dilemma of the three soldiers comes into view. Then the film explores the inquiry by the police officer, whose wife lies dying from a bullet wound in the hospital, and finally the older brother and his journalist girlfriend, so worried about the fate of the witness, who is a little girl.
Few films could handle so many shifts in protagonists, but with this cast under the guidance of a director in full command of the language of cinema and the art of storytelling, these shifts come off with startling ease.
Bresan follows a recent filmmaking trend that eschews linear narration in favor of a fractured story wherein the same events are recounted from different viewpoints, letting motivations and back story gradually fill in a picture that is only completely clear in the film's final moments.
Bresan is being anything but trendy, however, as the multiple retellings underscore the movie's theme -- that everybody has reasons for behaving as he or she does. Episodes over a couple of days -- retold with subplots, digressions and seemingly minor characters along with flashbacks to a war raging nearby -- reveal a web of deceit that stems from desperation and despair.
Based on Jurica Pavicic's novel "Alabaster Sheep", which evidently did tell its story in a traditional narrative, the script by the novelist, director and cinematographer traces a murder and police investigation in a small town in Croatia near the front line of the civil war more than a decade ago. Fueled by alcohol, three Croatian soldiers try to plant a bomb at the home of a Serb alleged to be a smuggler and black marketer. Startled to find him home -- he is supposed to be away -- they are forced to shoot him. Then they discover a witness whom they capture and hide in a garage belonging to the mother of one soldier.
The mother (Mirjana Karanovic), who the next day must bury a husband who was killed at the front, enlists a political uncle to cover up the crime. An honest cop (Drazen Kuhn) and a female journalist (Alma Prica) launch separate investigations. Then a crippled soldier (Leon Lucev), the boyfriend of the journalist and the mother's elder son, returns home, and more secrets and lies spill out.
The different viewpoints reveal the interconnections of nearly everyone in the small town, a microcosm for what happened in Croatia, where terrible things occurred during the war and everyone, in a sense, bore witness to these crimes against humanity.
Bresan's superb cast plays these roles with arresting intensity. Life, once measured in months and years, during civil carnage now boils down to a matter of moments. Everything gets speeded up and frantic, yet by fracturing the narrative, Bresan succeeds in slowing things back down so we can appreciate the moral vacuum created by war.
The mother, the movie's initial focal point, struggles to hold her family together. But as the movie continues to shift viewpoints, the dilemma of the three soldiers comes into view. Then the film explores the inquiry by the police officer, whose wife lies dying from a bullet wound in the hospital, and finally the older brother and his journalist girlfriend, so worried about the fate of the witness, who is a little girl.
Few films could handle so many shifts in protagonists, but with this cast under the guidance of a director in full command of the language of cinema and the art of storytelling, these shifts come off with startling ease.
A moderately involving political fable and rare Croatian comedy, "Marsal" (aka "Marshal Tito's Spirit") is the country's entry for the 73rd Annual Academy Awards. It's a long shot at best for a nomination and has no domestic commercial future beyond film fest and ethnic cineaste engagements. The film was showcased recently in the American Cinematheque series "Wednesdays in Croatia".
The second feature-length project from director Vinko Bresan ("How the War Started on My Island"), "Marsal" opened in Zagreb in December 1999 and was a boxoffice success. It was greeted as a reconciliation-themed comedy with a remarkable timeliness. Bresan collaborates again on the provocative and irreverent screenplay with his playwright father, Ivo.
Considered so touchy a film when it premiered in Croatia that television advertising for it was censored, "Marsal" is set on a small unnamed island so isolated that a "red" revival occurs when superstitious locals come to believe the ghost of Yugoslavia's former dictator is walking among them. In fact, it's a mental patient bearing an uncanny resemblance to Josip Broz (Marshal Tito), who died in 1980, but many of the island's aging communists take the opportunity to seize power.
Led by cynical zealot Marinko (Ilija Ivezi), the old World War II partisan fighters go one step further than the mayor (Ivo Gregurevic), who has dreams of opening a Tito-themed tourist attraction. An investigating policeman from the mainland, Stipan (Drazen Kuhn), is a local boy who has the most success with attracting the fetching daughter (Linda Begonja) of the bewildered Tito impersonator.
Evenhanded in its skewering of Croatian social strata and lampooning of generational bad habits but hardly incendiary or particularly urgent for non-Europeans, "Marsal" employs communist symbols and traditions for gags, while the humor varies widely from fart jokes to screwball comedy. The actors are more memorable than the material, but "Marsal", like mild medicine, plays out more rewardingly the less one complains about the experience.
MARSAL
Interfilm
Director: Vinko Bresan
Screenwriters: Ivo Bresan, Vinko Bresan
Producers: Ljubo Siki, Ivan Maloa
Director of photography: Zivko Zalar
Production designer: Mario Ivezi
Editor: Sandra Botica Bresan
Costume designer: Vesna Plese
Music: Mate Matesi
Color/stereo
Cast:
Stipan: Drazen Kuhn
Slavica: Linda Begonja
Marinko: Ilija Ivezi
Luka: Ivo Gregurevic
Jakov: Boris Buzancic
Running time -- 91 minutes
No MPAA rating...
The second feature-length project from director Vinko Bresan ("How the War Started on My Island"), "Marsal" opened in Zagreb in December 1999 and was a boxoffice success. It was greeted as a reconciliation-themed comedy with a remarkable timeliness. Bresan collaborates again on the provocative and irreverent screenplay with his playwright father, Ivo.
Considered so touchy a film when it premiered in Croatia that television advertising for it was censored, "Marsal" is set on a small unnamed island so isolated that a "red" revival occurs when superstitious locals come to believe the ghost of Yugoslavia's former dictator is walking among them. In fact, it's a mental patient bearing an uncanny resemblance to Josip Broz (Marshal Tito), who died in 1980, but many of the island's aging communists take the opportunity to seize power.
Led by cynical zealot Marinko (Ilija Ivezi), the old World War II partisan fighters go one step further than the mayor (Ivo Gregurevic), who has dreams of opening a Tito-themed tourist attraction. An investigating policeman from the mainland, Stipan (Drazen Kuhn), is a local boy who has the most success with attracting the fetching daughter (Linda Begonja) of the bewildered Tito impersonator.
Evenhanded in its skewering of Croatian social strata and lampooning of generational bad habits but hardly incendiary or particularly urgent for non-Europeans, "Marsal" employs communist symbols and traditions for gags, while the humor varies widely from fart jokes to screwball comedy. The actors are more memorable than the material, but "Marsal", like mild medicine, plays out more rewardingly the less one complains about the experience.
MARSAL
Interfilm
Director: Vinko Bresan
Screenwriters: Ivo Bresan, Vinko Bresan
Producers: Ljubo Siki, Ivan Maloa
Director of photography: Zivko Zalar
Production designer: Mario Ivezi
Editor: Sandra Botica Bresan
Costume designer: Vesna Plese
Music: Mate Matesi
Color/stereo
Cast:
Stipan: Drazen Kuhn
Slavica: Linda Begonja
Marinko: Ilija Ivezi
Luka: Ivo Gregurevic
Jakov: Boris Buzancic
Running time -- 91 minutes
No MPAA rating...
BERLIN -- "Svjedoci" (Witnesses) is a masterful piece of storytelling that looks at events surrounding a murder and the possible execution of its only witness through various points of view. Croatian director Vinko Bresan, whose first two films were political satires, abandons irony here for an honest and emotional account of how war and ethnic hatred corrupt moral behavior. With top-notch production values, especially fluid and sharp-focused cinematography by Zivko Zalar, this Berlinale competition film makes an excellent candidate for art houses everywhere.
Bresan follows a recent filmmaking trend that eschews linear narration in favor of a fractured story wherein the same events are recounted from different viewpoints, letting motivations and back story gradually fill in a picture that is only completely clear in the film's final moments.
Bresan is being anything but trendy, however, as the multiple retellings underscore the movie's theme -- that everybody has reasons for behaving as he or she does. Episodes over a couple of days -- retold with subplots, digressions and seemingly minor characters along with flashbacks to a war raging nearby -- reveal a web of deceit that stems from desperation and despair.
Based on Jurica Pavicic's novel "Alabaster Sheep", which evidently did tell its story in a traditional narrative, the script by the novelist, director and cinematographer traces a murder and police investigation in a small town in Croatia near the front line of the civil war more than a decade ago. Fueled by alcohol, three Croatian soldiers try to plant a bomb at the home of a Serb alleged to be a smuggler and black marketer. Startled to find him home -- he is supposed to be away -- they are forced to shoot him. Then they discover a witness whom they capture and hide in a garage belonging to the mother of one soldier.
The mother (Mirjana Karanovic), who the next day must bury a husband who was killed at the front, enlists a political uncle to cover up the crime. An honest cop (Drazen Kuhn) and a female journalist (Alma Prica) launch separate investigations. Then a crippled soldier (Leon Lucev), the boyfriend of the journalist and the mother's elder son, returns home, and more secrets and lies spill out.
The different viewpoints reveal the interconnections of nearly everyone in the small town, a microcosm for what happened in Croatia, where terrible things occurred during the war and everyone, in a sense, bore witness to these crimes against humanity.
Bresan's superb cast plays these roles with arresting intensity. Life, once measured in months and years, during civil carnage now boils down to a matter of moments. Everything gets speeded up and frantic, yet by fracturing the narrative, Bresan succeeds in slowing things back down so we can appreciate the moral vacuum created by war.
The mother, the movie's initial focal point, struggles to hold her family together. But as the movie continues to shift viewpoints, the dilemma of the three soldiers comes into view. Then the film explores the inquiry by the police officer, whose wife lies dying from a bullet wound in the hospital, and finally the older brother and his journalist girlfriend, so worried about the fate of the witness, who is a little girl.
Few films could handle so many shifts in protagonists, but with this cast under the guidance of a director in full command of the language of cinema and the art of storytelling, these shifts come off with startling ease.
Bresan follows a recent filmmaking trend that eschews linear narration in favor of a fractured story wherein the same events are recounted from different viewpoints, letting motivations and back story gradually fill in a picture that is only completely clear in the film's final moments.
Bresan is being anything but trendy, however, as the multiple retellings underscore the movie's theme -- that everybody has reasons for behaving as he or she does. Episodes over a couple of days -- retold with subplots, digressions and seemingly minor characters along with flashbacks to a war raging nearby -- reveal a web of deceit that stems from desperation and despair.
Based on Jurica Pavicic's novel "Alabaster Sheep", which evidently did tell its story in a traditional narrative, the script by the novelist, director and cinematographer traces a murder and police investigation in a small town in Croatia near the front line of the civil war more than a decade ago. Fueled by alcohol, three Croatian soldiers try to plant a bomb at the home of a Serb alleged to be a smuggler and black marketer. Startled to find him home -- he is supposed to be away -- they are forced to shoot him. Then they discover a witness whom they capture and hide in a garage belonging to the mother of one soldier.
The mother (Mirjana Karanovic), who the next day must bury a husband who was killed at the front, enlists a political uncle to cover up the crime. An honest cop (Drazen Kuhn) and a female journalist (Alma Prica) launch separate investigations. Then a crippled soldier (Leon Lucev), the boyfriend of the journalist and the mother's elder son, returns home, and more secrets and lies spill out.
The different viewpoints reveal the interconnections of nearly everyone in the small town, a microcosm for what happened in Croatia, where terrible things occurred during the war and everyone, in a sense, bore witness to these crimes against humanity.
Bresan's superb cast plays these roles with arresting intensity. Life, once measured in months and years, during civil carnage now boils down to a matter of moments. Everything gets speeded up and frantic, yet by fracturing the narrative, Bresan succeeds in slowing things back down so we can appreciate the moral vacuum created by war.
The mother, the movie's initial focal point, struggles to hold her family together. But as the movie continues to shift viewpoints, the dilemma of the three soldiers comes into view. Then the film explores the inquiry by the police officer, whose wife lies dying from a bullet wound in the hospital, and finally the older brother and his journalist girlfriend, so worried about the fate of the witness, who is a little girl.
Few films could handle so many shifts in protagonists, but with this cast under the guidance of a director in full command of the language of cinema and the art of storytelling, these shifts come off with startling ease.
A moderately involving political fable and rare Croatian comedy, "Marsal" (aka "Marshal Tito's Spirit") is the country's entry for the 73rd Annual Academy Awards. It's a long shot at best for a nomination and has no domestic commercial future beyond film fest and ethnic cineaste engagements. The film was showcased recently in the American Cinematheque series "Wednesdays in Croatia".
The second feature-length project from director Vinko Bresan ("How the War Started on My Island"), "Marsal" opened in Zagreb in December 1999 and was a boxoffice success. It was greeted as a reconciliation-themed comedy with a remarkable timeliness. Bresan collaborates again on the provocative and irreverent screenplay with his playwright father, Ivo.
Considered so touchy a film when it premiered in Croatia that television advertising for it was censored, "Marsal" is set on a small unnamed island so isolated that a "red" revival occurs when superstitious locals come to believe the ghost of Yugoslavia's former dictator is walking among them. In fact, it's a mental patient bearing an uncanny resemblance to Josip Broz (Marshal Tito), who died in 1980, but many of the island's aging communists take the opportunity to seize power.
Led by cynical zealot Marinko (Ilija Ivezi), the old World War II partisan fighters go one step further than the mayor (Ivo Gregurevic), who has dreams of opening a Tito-themed tourist attraction. An investigating policeman from the mainland, Stipan (Drazen Kuhn), is a local boy who has the most success with attracting the fetching daughter (Linda Begonja) of the bewildered Tito impersonator.
Evenhanded in its skewering of Croatian social strata and lampooning of generational bad habits but hardly incendiary or particularly urgent for non-Europeans, "Marsal" employs communist symbols and traditions for gags, while the humor varies widely from fart jokes to screwball comedy. The actors are more memorable than the material, but "Marsal", like mild medicine, plays out more rewardingly the less one complains about the experience.
MARSAL
Interfilm
Director: Vinko Bresan
Screenwriters: Ivo Bresan, Vinko Bresan
Producers: Ljubo Siki, Ivan Maloa
Director of photography: Zivko Zalar
Production designer: Mario Ivezi
Editor: Sandra Botica Bresan
Costume designer: Vesna Plese
Music: Mate Matesi
Color/stereo
Cast:
Stipan: Drazen Kuhn
Slavica: Linda Begonja
Marinko: Ilija Ivezi
Luka: Ivo Gregurevic
Jakov: Boris Buzancic
Running time -- 91 minutes
No MPAA rating...
The second feature-length project from director Vinko Bresan ("How the War Started on My Island"), "Marsal" opened in Zagreb in December 1999 and was a boxoffice success. It was greeted as a reconciliation-themed comedy with a remarkable timeliness. Bresan collaborates again on the provocative and irreverent screenplay with his playwright father, Ivo.
Considered so touchy a film when it premiered in Croatia that television advertising for it was censored, "Marsal" is set on a small unnamed island so isolated that a "red" revival occurs when superstitious locals come to believe the ghost of Yugoslavia's former dictator is walking among them. In fact, it's a mental patient bearing an uncanny resemblance to Josip Broz (Marshal Tito), who died in 1980, but many of the island's aging communists take the opportunity to seize power.
Led by cynical zealot Marinko (Ilija Ivezi), the old World War II partisan fighters go one step further than the mayor (Ivo Gregurevic), who has dreams of opening a Tito-themed tourist attraction. An investigating policeman from the mainland, Stipan (Drazen Kuhn), is a local boy who has the most success with attracting the fetching daughter (Linda Begonja) of the bewildered Tito impersonator.
Evenhanded in its skewering of Croatian social strata and lampooning of generational bad habits but hardly incendiary or particularly urgent for non-Europeans, "Marsal" employs communist symbols and traditions for gags, while the humor varies widely from fart jokes to screwball comedy. The actors are more memorable than the material, but "Marsal", like mild medicine, plays out more rewardingly the less one complains about the experience.
MARSAL
Interfilm
Director: Vinko Bresan
Screenwriters: Ivo Bresan, Vinko Bresan
Producers: Ljubo Siki, Ivan Maloa
Director of photography: Zivko Zalar
Production designer: Mario Ivezi
Editor: Sandra Botica Bresan
Costume designer: Vesna Plese
Music: Mate Matesi
Color/stereo
Cast:
Stipan: Drazen Kuhn
Slavica: Linda Begonja
Marinko: Ilija Ivezi
Luka: Ivo Gregurevic
Jakov: Boris Buzancic
Running time -- 91 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 12/28/2000
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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