European Films

A gentle magical-realist breeze blows through wintertime Belgrade in Ljubav i drugi zlocini (Love and Other Crimes), the feature debut of Stefan Arsenijevic that is part of the Panorama section here in Berlin. The film follows a crucial day in the life of a woman in her late thirties who attempts to finally leave the country with the contents of her boss’s safe only to find the most unexpected of things on her path: love. Like its austere production design with its occasional flashes of colour  -- an orange orange! a pink nightgown! -- the film is a stark drama that makes it perfectly clear why Anica wants to leave while at the same time showing that love (or indeed anything else) can happen in the most unlikely places.

 

Anica works for one of the two local mobsters, Milutin (Fedja Stojanovic), who is also her lover, though her relationship with him seems to be informed by habit more than anything else. Milutin’s young right hand is the young thug Stanislav (Vuk Kostic). On a given day, while the first snow slowly descends on the city and Milutin expects to receive that month’s protection money, Anica decides the time has come to leave that evening with the contents of Milutin’s safe. Arsenijevic shows her entire day rationally divided into portions ("early morning", "mid-morning"…), though all other elements of the film are much less structured, including the characters’ feelings and Arsenijevic’ unique tone.

Ljubav i drugi zlocini (Love and Other Crimes) reunites two Serbian actors from films in opposing local film traditions: Vuk Kostic, from Kusturica’s Zivot je Cudo (Life is a Miracle) and Anica Dobra from the Oscar-shortlisted Klopka (The Trap). The former is vintage Kusturica, a zany Balkan comedy in which Kostic has a deranged opera singer for a mother, while the latter casts Dobra as the widow of a murdered criminal who was taken out by a father who needed the money for an operation on his son.

 

Arsenijevic finds a gentle middle way between both traditions, still putting Kostic up with a mad singing mother (Milena Dravic) but toning down the comedy and setting the story in a gray and corrupt contemporary Belgrade sprinkled with the magical realism of novelists such as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez (whose novella Of Love and Other Demons reminds of this film’s title). In films like Klopka, mute teenage girls and escaped parrots would look odd, but they are very much at home in the world created here, with cinematographer Simon Tansek and production designer Volker Schaefer finding exactly the right balance.

 

Some of the director’s other exotic touches include the Spanish-language Bésame Mucho that dominates the soundtrack and occasionally flashy visuals such as oranges, the favourite fruit of one of the characters, and Latin American soap operas that play continually on TVs in the background. The quirks are never just quirks for quirk’s sake, however, and the screenplay by the director, Bojan Vuletic and Srdan Koljevic is a classroom example of how to mix different genres into a coherent whole, with some of their more daring scenes – including a planned suicide saved by a serenade on a rooftop – working according to their own logic.

 

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