***/****
starring starring Goran Slavković, Jasmin Geljo
written and directed by Igor Drljaca
by Angelo Muredda 2012 was an unusually
rich year for Canadian cinema, from the strangely fruitful pairing of David
Cronenberg and Don DeLillo in Cosmopolis–though it comes from DeLillo, is there a more
Cronenbergian line about deformity than the doctor's insistence that Robert
Pattinson let his mole "express itself"?–to the near perfect genre
vehicle of Michael Dowse's Goon.
Both films are legibly Canadian in terms of content, despite Cosmopolis's faux-Manhattan setting, but one of the most
heartening developments in last year's crop was a turn to formalism that might
confound expectations about what our movies are supposed to look and sound
like. Weird
Sex and Snowshoes,
both Katherine Monk's book and Jill Sharpe's documentary adaptation of it,
sketched a history of Canadian cinema through its dourness of tone and harsh
thematic machinations–necrophilia, the malevolent north, and so on–so successfully
as to canonize that image. Yet films like Panos Cosmatos's Beyond
the Black Rainbow and now Igor Drljaca's
Krivina (which debuted at last year's TIFF) are a nice reminder that there's also a sharp
formalist strain, à la
Michael Snow, for which such thematic surveys can't quite account.
Krivina is an impressive debut feature from the Toronto-based
filmmaker, a slick calling card even when it loses its narrative footing for
the occasional stretch. The film follows construction worker Miro (Goran
Slavković), a Yugoslavian immigrant housed in Toronto since the late-'90s, as
he searches for news of Dado, an unseen friend who's apparently been charged
with participating in war crimes since they last spoke. Never really at
home in his adopted country, Miro heads back to Bosnia to find him, engaging in
a number of elliptical conversations with old acquaintances in older
haunts as he effectively circles back to himself. The Bosnian and Toronto landscapes (and soundscapes) tend to melt into each other in one of Drljaca's boldest conceits, a predilection for lengthy tracking shots jolted out of their continuity by sudden shifts in geography.
Drljaca is clearly working in a stylized realm
akin to expressionism, charting Miro's post-traumatic, jumbled state of mind
after the Bosnian War through these spatial transgressions and even cannier
moments of bifurcated sound design. Miro's ears, and ours, take in a mixture of
diegetic sounds from wherever he stands at the moment–a construction site, a
bird's flapping wings–and remembered sounds from elsewhere, including the
haunting melody of a folk song that appears to point him back to his origins
whenever he deviates from them. One cut from a colleague's cell-phone ring in a
car to a phone alarm in Miro's apartment is especially jarring, partly because
it's so continuous despite the radical location shift.
The coup here is how Drljaca manages to anchor
this formal play in his sparsely-constructed script, which takes seriously Miro's
restlessness as an immigrant and a former refugee, even as it marries this story
to a fairly traditional quest structure that doesn't always pay off. The few
sustained stretches of dialogue we get (Miro is not exactly loquacious) are
from his co-worker Drago (Jasmin Geljo), who relays his refugee status in stark
terms on their morning drives to work. Drago's prickliness makes him a more
interesting case study for the Canadian refugee experience than what's arguably
been the best developed example in our cinema so far, the title character of
Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar. His account of being offered free euthanasia for his
dog upon arrival at the refugee centre is chilling, despite the writerliness of the speech in this otherwise quiet film. With his lengthy
dreamlike sequences of characters hurtling through space in vehicles, Drljaca's
main inspiration seems to be the discombobulating lyricism of Tarkovsky,
but Krivina is neither mere imitation nor homage so much as an
earnest point of departure.
