Brent Marchant

When a filmmaker comes up with a good idea for a movie, it’s essential to make sure that all of the key elements are in place when production begins and that carry through into the finished product. This is particularly true for nailing the items intended to have the most impact and eliminating the flotsam that can clutter the final cut. But, in the case of writer-director Ivona Juka’s third feature outing, the filmmaker only gets the formula half right. Without a doubt, Juka scores big on the high-impact material, but the completed work truly could have used another round of script revisions and ruthless film editing to chop out the extraneous material linking these sequences, dead weight that often tends to sink the flow of the picture like an overloaded hammock. This release follows the lives of Yugoslavian director Lovro Horvat (Dado Cosic) and screenwriter Nenad Milicic (Djordje Galic), partners in filmmaking and in life who distinguished themselves as defenders of their homeland during World War II. However, as much as they might like to believe that their combat heroics have insulated them against criticism for their gay lifestyle, they come under growing scrutiny in the 1950s when they attempt to make pictures that are seen as going against the socialist dogma of Yugoslavian leader Marshal Tito. And their “deviant” lifestyle – including alternative “shameful” sexuality, a love of Western music and banned books, and a belief in the existence of free thinking in an allegedly democratic society – provides precisely the kind of trumped up motivation the government needs to surveil them as suspects for traitorous behavior, their wartime accomplishments notwithstanding. Given this context, the story mixes political intrigue and covert spying with tender romantic moments and unforgivably brutal treatment at the hands of merciless official operatives. And it’s in those high-impact moments of warm, loving romance, passionate sexuality, and explicit inhumanity where the director succeeds in making genuinely bold visual and thematic statements, holding nothing back in doing so (sensitive viewers take note for the graphic nature of these depictions). But the in-between moments are when the picture falls decidedly flat, incorporating material that adds little to the narrative and slowing the pace significantly. That’s unfortunate given its otherwise-impressive production values, including strong performances, stunning black-and-white cinematography, a carefully crafted production design, a hauntingly emotive original score and an aptly programmed complementary soundtrack. It also astutely handled re-creations of Yugoslav propaganda films of the era, the kinds of pictures that Horvat and Milicic are relegated to creating when their own projects are sidelined for their “inappropriate” content. These assets, however, are not enough to overcome the deficiencies in the screenplay and film editing (especially the many redundancies in each of these areas), qualities that detract from this offering’s overall quality. Regrettably, these shortcomings get in the way of telling an important (and troubling) tale, one that’s not widely known and that has an eerie relevance in light of recent developments regarding the future of the LGBTQ+ community, not only in the setting of this story, but elsewhere as well. Sadly, acceptance often carries a cost, one that we all need to be aware of through vehicles that make this indisputably clear before it’s too late.