A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.
Back in the day, in the late Yugoslav times, the synonymfor Montenegrian cinema was Živko Nikolić, the writer-director who tackled the themes of modernity and freedom (and the lack of it) in traditional, confined, almost insular societies and family units of Montenegro in time. His work was locally colored, mesmerizing, darkly funny, but also pessimistic: modernity and personal freedom never stood any real chances and the conservative tendencies only switched forms throughout the time. Since that time, nothing really interesting happened in Montenegrian cinema, every year with more than one feature title can be seen as an extremely good one, and most of them are not “consumable” even locally, but a new hope can be seen on a horizon in the form of first-time writer-director Ivan Marinović and his film The Black Pin.
Marinović has done his homework. Like Nikolić, he is locally focused and colourful in the way he is portraying the area and its people, and his themes of miscommunicationand opposing world-views are as universal as they are local. But compared to often cynical and misanthropic Nikolić, Marinović is more light-hearted and actually cares for his characters. Other influences can be found also, like the work of the writer Miljenko Smoje, playwright Ivo Brešan and his filmmaker son Vinko who are from the neighbouringCroatian region of Dalmatia and very much into the phenomenology of its people’s spirit. But The Black Pin is not just the collection of influences, it is a work of passion.
The place is the peninsula of Luštica, the time is now. People are rushing to sell the small portions of land they have to whomever that comes first, usually the Russians. The group of locals has hatched a plan to sell a big piece of land to some British investment fund interested in building a resort there. But there’s a catch: an old woman that has the reputation of a local witch dies before they can make deal with her, leaving the land to distant relatives scattered from South America to Australia. The only alternative for them is to convince the local priest Petar to join their plan.
That could be a problem, since Petar (Macedonian actor Nikola Ristanovski) is not much interested in ephemeral things like money as he is interested in fond memories of his long-gone father, taking care of his demented mother (Yugoslav star Seka Sablićin one of her crazier parts) and trying to bring up his teenage son Đorđe (débutanteFilip Klicov) since his wife left him. More to the point, Petar is quite misanthropic and bitter, and is not on particularly good terms with the men who are planning to sell and has no wish to help them. Can a retired seaman Dondo (Bogdan Diklić, good as always) help them find some common ground?
The Black Pin is one of those slice-of-life bittersweet comedy-dramas that can cast its net too wide and get lost is side-plots and sub-plots that go nowhere. Sometimes, that happens here too, there is a sub-plot or two too much and that time could be better spent developing the relations between characters and adding another dimension to their conflict. But the feeling is right from the start, since Marinović is more interested in the atmosphere and the mood of the local area. Well-acted, confidently directed and masterfully shot in chiaroscuro contrasts, The Black Pin works best as a love letter to a place, the director’s childhood and all the local legends and anecdotes every Adriatic village has.
