Vladimir Perisic presents at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023, a brave film that shows the human side of the power system. Since the time of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the theme of the guilt of fathers not having to be borne by sons has been addressed. It never ceased to be topical. From ancient Greece onward, there have been countless Iphigenias sacrificed for political reasons, Antigoneses who atoned for the sins of the parents, or cycles of revenge a la Medea. Lost Country somehow takes the form of yet another piece in this puzzle of atonement and responsibility.
Set in Milosevic’s Belgrade at the time of the 1996 elections, the film recounts the period of the victory of the opposition and the Serbian government’s nullification of the vote, resulting in the movements of demonstrations, which eventually led to the citizens regaining their rights.
Against this backdrop, Vladimir Perisic grafts his personal modern tragedy. After Ordinary People (2009), the Serbian director returns to the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2023 with his second feature film, a drama that draws its strength from the sober and much intimate direction and from the impeccable acting of the two leads, who are mother and son in the fiction
The two represent the ideological and generational clashes that the transition to two different power systems always manifests.
Stefan is fifteen years old and his only concerns should be the sentimental ones of teenagers in high school. But he lives in Belgrade in 1996 and there’s a joke in the film that perfectly sums up the hopelessness that he’s now used to: “Living with AIDS: it’s not the worst thing that can happen to you in Serbia?” “What’s the worst?” “Living in Serbia”. His mom is a leading member of the Socialist Party of Serbia, a dying dinosaur that tries to hang on to power by the only means it has: when there is no longer ideological grip, violence can still work. Or so they hope. That is why the police continue to suppress protests, arresting young students and even sending undercover officers to mess in the streets so as to give the government a pretext to attack and lead the counterstrike. After all, you just have to keep denying; denying everything. Like the mother will do to her son throughout the film. Her name is Marklena, a contraction of Marx and Lenin. And she embodies the old system, but we don’t know it since the beginning.
The film in fact starts off cleverly. Rather than entering ex abrupto into the midst of the city tumult, the first images provided to the audience are elegiac and bucolic. Stefan is in the country at his grandparents’, tending to the trees, eating nice food and enjoying the family company in which he does seem to flourish. Marklena’s arrival is greeted with affection. She is a clearly sophisticated, charming career woman, an avid smoker and a caring, present mother.
Before getting into the thick of the conflict, the director outlines a strong and natural maternal love, a relationship that is solid, sweet and seemingly unbreakable. Then the return to the city. Perisic’s skills lie in slowly immersing the audience in the atmosphere of political turmoil, and to lead the audience to understand the role of the woman in the country dynamic very gradually, and hand in hand with Stefan.
Torn between the sincere affection for his mother and his rising political awareness, the young man must come to terms with the reality of the situation. What is intimate, innocent and pure for him is not necessarily so for others. To his classmates, his mother is a “fascist,” and Stefan will have to figure out what she is to him and whether he can still accept a woman whose decisions contribute to the arrest of innocents and the furtherance of a system he now understands to be sick.
The question is whether one can separate love from judgment; the natural bond from the sentence. The Serbian director poses it with masterful choices. By presenting Marklene first within the private sphere and never directly in the public sphere, it leads us to develop an attachment towards her, which brings about a scathing dilemma, the same one that Stefan has to cope up with. Are we to hate the woman who kisses her son before bed? Who comforts and supports him? Who wraps a book for her father’s birthday? Who jokes affectionately as she puts on lipstick and talks about dinners and movies? The woman who worries about her son’s homework and who – like any mother – suffers when his gaze changes in her regard?
Vladimir Perisic does not give an answer, but rather builds a smart film whose main point of interest is the very absence of blacks and whites, and rather the insistence on grey. The same color that many times envelops the two characters when they hug and we can’t see them clearly in the semi-lit darkness.
It would have been too easy to reduce this troublesome matter to an icon, a symbol, a party. We too often forget that these are made of people, who – as such – are more or less moved by similar drives as any other human in their daily life. They have a favorite dish, a favorite song or film, they probably love their parents or their kids, and they wrap presents when they go to birthday parties. Until we understand this, it will be very hard to grasp what keeps oppressive regimes going: it’s the human side. Power is not a machine, but brain, flesh and feelings.
And Sapiens are complicated and contradictory beasts. That is why Lost Country is a wise, brave and honest opera. It’s not only a political and historical film, but it’s mostly about human nature.
The camera stays close to the characters, whom we often see in close-ups, in their most heartfelt and sincere glances, often reflected in mirror surfaces that multiply their faces like the thousand facets of their personality. Of everyone’s personality. We are with Stefan and we experience his same sense of loss and disorientation as he slowly grows aware of his mother’s responsibility in the utmost injustice that his generation is facing.
This, added to the rejection by his classmates for whom he is nothing more than the son of the politician who must bear some inherent guilt, will lead Stefan to a final gesture that definitively inscribes him in the circle of the characters of Greek tragedy. A gesture that abruptly shuts the ending, which perhaps would have benefited more from being left open.
Lost Country is a dark – or better, grey – reflection, but one that can bring light to many things.
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