At the Crossroads: Slovenian Cinema.

Last October, the Film Society of Lincoln Center offered New York City a surprising festival of Croatian film, the first in its four-part look at the cinemas of the former Yugoslavia. I managed to see a quartet of excellent films from that group - Armin, Fine Dead Girls, Dejan Sorak's brilliant Two Players from the Bench and a classic from the early 70s, A Village Performance of Hamlet - all of which convinced me that Croatian cinema was something to which I should pay more attention.

The FSLC (with major support and collaboration from the Slovenian Film Fund) launches its week-long second installment, devoted to Slovenian Cinema, tomorrow Once again, I arrive as a novice and leave somewhat closer to an acolyte. Titled At the Crossroads: Slovenian Cinema, the program consists of 13 films, contemporary to classic. According to program director Richard Peña, "At a time in which most discussions of international cinema focus on the negative impact of globalization, Slovenia has become an uplifting and inspiring success story for the cinemas of other small nations." Slovenia currently turns out six to eight films per year and is becoming an increasingly familiar presence at international film festivals, notes Peña.

Opening night will offer the premiere of Marko Nabersnik's Rooster's Breakfast (site), an enormous commercial success in Slovenia last year, as well as the recipient of national awards for best director, actor and screenplay. Seven other contemporary films will be shown, including Outsider, Slovenia's biggest box office hit in 1991; the college comedy Idle Running from 1999; and Spare Parts, the 2003 film that helped establish Damjan Kozole as Slovenia's best-known director.

Five "classic" films from the 50s, 60s and 80s complete the program: the immensely popular domestic comedy Vesna (1953); a beautifully photographed war film, Valley of Peace (1956); the modernist-styled Dance in the Rain (1961); Paper Planes (1967); and 1980's Raft of the Medusa, which offers a rare glimpse of the free-thinking Yugoslav cinema that existed in the years before its republics began declaring independence and breaking away.

Two important personages will be present during the series: Rooster's Breakfast director/adapter Marko Nabersnik will introduce screenings of his film on Wednesday, July 16, at 6:30 pm, and Saturday, July 19, at 5:00 pm. And author, film writer, filmmaker and Slovenian scholar Joseph Valencic will introduce several screenings during the series. (Interestingly, Valencic is based in Cleveland, the city with the greatest concentration of Slovenians outside of Europe.)

As often happens during particular festivals at the Walter Reade Theatre, the FSLC's adjacent Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery will host an art event that compliments the films. In this case, it's Posters from Metelkova, on view from Thursday through August 1. (Metelkova is an alternative culture community in the heart of Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana, dedicated to organizing non-institutional social and cultural activities for the public.) The exhibit will present film festival posters, architectural drawings and collages produced in Metelkova in the 1990s. The Gallery is open daily 1:30 to 6:00 pm.

One of the major frustrations accompanying festivals such as this one for me is the fact that I cannot see all the films included, as I do with the annual French, Spanish and Italian fests. Consequently, I don't come away with nearly as much of a feeling for the country itself. Viewing only three films out of thirteen is a paltry sampling, but one must be grateful for whatever time is allowed him.

Rooster's Breakfast - we don't learn the meaning of the title until late in the film, but the reveal's a humdinger - seems a good choice for a series opener, as it probably approximates well the current state of mainstream Slovenia cinema. It's relatively fast-paced (even if it clocks it at just over two hours) and full of colorful characters, rock music, sex, death and double dealing. The film begins with a sadly typical boss bidding goodbye to a suddenly downsized employee. Be it Slovenia, Italy (Days and Clouds) or the US (Kabluey), the pinch is being felt everywhere, it seems.

Our hero Djuro (nicely played by Primoz Bezjak, who keeps his "hunkiness" under wraps) is recommended for similar work in a small-town garage owned by a salty old fellow, played by Slovenian theater pro Vlado Novak. He's terrific: alternately weird, funny, sad, smart, foolish - and always believable. These two make a lovely, complementary duo, as Djuro tries to keep to himself but ends up getting sucked into his employer's friendships and schemes as well as an affair with the gorgeous and sometimes available wife of the local crime boss (the slick and smart Pia Zemljic).

What's most affecting here is the sense of place and character: everyone seems odd, needy and trapped somehow in the past. We can identify with the needs on display, yet the way these people go about satisfying them seems a bit prehistoric. If you were to view this group is exemplary, you'd assume the national character must entail a combination of whining and cheating - here, followed by a sudden confrontation in which a person stands up for himself and either wins or suffers the consequences. All quite strange, but not unbelievable. The entire cast - made up of a number of endearing oddballs - is just fine; ditto the cinematography, editing and music (which plays a big part in the proceedings). If the movie, which I think wants to be taken seriously as cinema, does not come close to the high-level mix of theme and imagination reached by Croatia's Two Players from the Bench, it works fine in its own mainstream, feel-good mode.

Spare Parts, an altogether darker (and I'll bet consequently less commercially successful) movie, written and directed by Damjan Kozole, is one of those rare films that may be difficult to endure but that leaves you feeling that you've witnessed a reality that has neither been sugar-coated nor shit-encrusted. Human trafficking is the subject, seen through the eyes, mind, body and heart of people who earn their living doing it. This is a switch from the usual, in which we might see all this from the viewpoint of the trafickee rather than the trafficker. We do see some of these "travelers," but mostly we're watching the boss and his new assistant live out their love, health and money problems. And we learn, subtly but clearly, how the job impacts them, just as it impacts their cargo.

Kozole combines a documentary feel with a spare, stark story that, though never hard to follow, does not work on the viewer in the manner of most movies, in which you immediately begin identifying with the lead characters. Identification here is loaded. God knows, this looks like a place from which you'd definitely want to escape.

For our third and final film here, we travel back to those wonderful 1960s, a time when cinema seemed to be opening up, often with a bang and beautiful fireworks (but sometimes just popping with a silly splat). Dance in the Rain is said to be one of the first films to introduce Yugoslavia to what was then considered modernist storytelling. To be fair to the movie, you'd have to be more familiar than I with what Yugoslavians had previously been subjected to, movie-wise. Even so, you may have a hard time differentiating the late Bostjan Hladnik's 1961 endeavor - combining failed love stories, fantasies and nightmares, the past and the present - from something approaching high camp.

The sumptuous black-and-white photography remains enticing and the cast is made up of competent actors who also look good (and certainly "of their time"). The story weaves in and out of the lives of a half-dozen people: an artist who's unhappy with his life, his current "squeeze" and his work; the "squeeze" herself, a theater actress who's beginning to age and so clings ever more tightly to her distant lover; the theater prompter, carrying an unrequited torch for the actress, an older, more cynical neighbor, who lives in the artist's building; and a dewy-eyed younger twosome, whose ingénue sweetness is used mainly as a foil to set off the whiny foolishness of the older set. All kinds of things happen, many of them imagined (some of which resemble moments from "artsy" plays of this same time period), until we arrive at an over-the-top climax that nudges the film even further toward camp. The denouement offers - yes! - that lovely young couple again, dancing in the rain.

According to the IMDB, this film was originally titled Dancing in the Rain, but the gerund form was removed, perhaps so that no one would mistake the movie for a Yugoslav sequel to the Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen classic. Once you seen this unusual piece of work, I don't imagine that you'd ever mistake one film for the other.

-James Van Maanen

Updates, 7/17: <"With its retrospective on Slovenian cinema, Lincoln Center sets out to prove that intelligent cinematic life exists in the post-Communist European landscape beyond Romania - and half-succeeds," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. "Sampling over half the slate, I found three winners, a few interesting misfires, and only a couple of outright dogs."

Andrew O'Hehir has a quick overview of the series for Salon.

More from Simon Abrams in the New York Press.

"Director Marko Nabersnik has a few explanations for both why [Rooster's Breakfast is] domestically successful and internationally a little inert, and why the Slovenian film industry generally remains below the radar." More from Vadim Rizov, this time at indieWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at July 15, 2008 11:51 AM