Posledice
**/****
written and directed by Darko Štante
by Bill Chambers A young woman escorts Andrej (Matej Zemljič) into the bedroom at a party but when the layers of clothing start coming off, he balks. She calls his manhood into question, and the next thing you know she's running out the door with a bloody mouth while he wraps his knuckles in a towel. Andrej, who looks mature but is apparently still a minor, appears in court, where his mother (Rosana Hribar) throws him spectacularly under the bus for his recent history of delinquency, emasculating him yet again. Back at home awaiting sentencing, he seethes; but hey, you do bad things, you gotta face the–smash-cut to the title in giant block letters–CONSEQUENCES (or POSLEDICE in the film's native Slovene). I don't know that I've ever encountered a movie so beset by its title, which feels like it should also be read aloud by Percy Rodriguez when it appears. It turns the picture into an after-school special, if not an alarmist educational reel from the '50s, in a way that calling it, say, "Karma," would not have. Andrej winds up at the Centre, a school for troubled kids that sounds rehabilitative on paper, yet the staff are too easily cowed by their feral charges, who are far more impressed with student gang leader Željko (Timon Šturbej). That goes double for the closeted Andrej, a good person deep down–we know because he dotes on a pet rat–drawn towards trouble by his attraction to bad boys. Actually, in this prison culture it seems that everyone is queer on the down-low, and Andrej falls into bed easily with Željko and his minions during their curfew-breaking evenings of debauchery. (The one woman on their crew is left largely to her own devices.) What Andrej fails or maybe refuses to see is that Željko doesn't share his yearning so much as he's an opportunist preying on it–that this is the tale of the scorpion and the frog and he, Andrej, is most definitely not the scorpion. In other words, if he dares defy Željko, there will be CONSEQUENCES. The film at least attempts to earn its scare-caps by showing that sometimes someone else will pay the price for your actions, in which case courting your comeuppance is no longer just self-flagellation, but I think it takes the wrong tack in punishing a confused gay teen for, ultimately, being a confused gay teen. (Again, take away that preachy title and Consequences gains considerable moral complexity.) Zemljič is very good, however, and smouldering even with the dickhead haircut of the alt right neo-Nazis. He seems poised for stardom, though I don't know how these things work in Slovenia. Programme: Discovery
