previously published on Cineuropa
“Expect the unexpected” would serve as a suitable piece of advice for a viewer readying themselves to watch a movie by Croatian filmmaker Nevio Marasović, who tends to take risks with his playful approach to established film genres. His newest work, Good Times, Bad Times, which enjoyed its world premiere in the national competition at Pula before going on a festival tour, continues exploring relationships between fathers and sons, which was the main topic of his previous effort, Comic Sans (2018), adopting an unapologetic cinematic worldview similar to that found in classical American melodramas. For this reason and for its clever structuring, this might be his best work to date, but an ironic twist of fate – the lead actor in a film about waiting for death actually dying before the premiere – gave the movie another layer of poignancy.
The actor in the spotlight here, Slovenian thesp Radko Polič Rac (to whom the film is dedicated), plays an old man, Hrvoje Kasum, who comes to a restaurant on what seems like a regular visit. He is offered wine and brandy by a waitress, which he accepts, before going outside to smoke a cigar. There, another waiter (Stjepan Perić) approaches him and offers him the same things, which the elderly gentleman accepts, before he starts observing the other visitors to the restaurant: a young couple on their first date, another couple of soon-to-be parents, some young families, a few broken families dealing with emotional trauma, a politician giving a motivational speech to his “apostles”, a few father-son pairings and so on.
Kasum does not interact with them, but both he and the people he observes interact with the waiter and the chef/restaurant owner (European Film Award winner Zlatko Burić). It seems that all of them and their individual stories captured at this particular moment in time are somehow connected to a singular story of betrayal and that, more specifically, they happen to be linked through the restaurant and its staff. The sounds of a football match blaring from a largely off-screen TV halfway through the film’s compact 72-minute running time might serve as a dead giveaway.
Good Times, Bad Times is a risky affair in almost every respect, from its confinement to a limited number of locations, to its extended cast consisting of pretty much the whole upper crust of the Croatian acting scene (including Marasović’s frequent collaborator Janko Popović Volarić), with all of these actors having only brief screen time to show what they are capable of, to the fact that Polič gets pretty much sidelined and relegated to the role of an observer for the whole middle section of the film. However, the risk has paid off thanks to Marasović’s ingenious approach to directing actors in bit roles, keeping them deliberately in the dark about the movie as a whole, and the polar opposite treatment he gives to the lead and the two supporting actors, who show a considerable amount of chemistry in their interplay, with Polič enjoying the opportunity to make an impressive swan song.
In the technical department, cinematographer Damir Kudin does his best to open up the confined spaces and make them look larger, while editor Tomislav Pavlic keeps up the rhythm and the dynamism in a film that could easily have ended up disjointed. Furthermore, the perfect match between Alen and Nenad Sinkauz’s original score and the theme songs by Arsen Dedić and Gabi Novak fine-tunes viewers’ emotions. Serving up a good chunk of mystery in the beginning and a purely emotional experience by the end, Good Times, Bad Times shows us the filmmaker behind it in the best possible light.