We follow a figure through Belgrade’s night streets into a gay cruising spot in a park, where an unusual encounter between the men there unfolds around the impulses of submission and voyeurism. The opening sequence of Dane Komljen’s Desire Lines, which screens in the In Focus programme of the Sarajevo Film Festival after its world premiere at Locarno, feels charged with the intensity and danger of uncertain limits.
The film is a spectral and hallucinatory landscape of bodies, which eat and gaze and desire but are also found to be frighteningly, or freeingly, insubstantial by those who inhabit them, as they shape-shift, merge, or even melt through walls. This is a poetic, unrushed but endlessly surprising vision, which operates according to a certain dream logic of echoing images rather than a traditional plot. Nonetheless, it has an unforced, intuitive coherence and affinity with nature (in keeping with his previous features including 2022’s Afterwater and 2024’s The Garden Cadences) that mesmerises.
Bosnian director Komljen is based in Berlin, and there is an abstracted quality to the conversation of characters as they recline in lush forest or intersect in the shadowy recesses of the concrete city that make the film feel kindred in spirit to the uncanny and unnaturalistic work of German arthouse festival favourite Angela Schanelec (the two have previously collaborated together), but it is very much its own thing, with a strange and remarkable ability to soothe with birdsong even as it shocks with latent horror. Festivals with an openness for daring experimentation should snap it up.
Branko (Ivan Cuic) has insomnia and is tormented by his chronic lack of sleep. This makes him feel out of sorts in his own body and feeds his paranoia. His solitary and mostly silent existence has become a half-state in which the borders between day and night, not to mention solid forms and illusion, are no longer distinct. He is not the only one feeling unsettled in their own skin, as a series of cryptic phone conversations in his apartment reveals. An old acquaintance who moved away from Belgrade calls in a panic. Her arm has been recently broken in an accident, and she is so transported by memories that she is “not even sure she has a body anymore.” Such interactions are never fleshed out with much backstory, but rather, create reverberations and mirrors between ideas and episodes. Even Janko’s younger brother, whose erratic outings worry him enough that he takes to following him, is an enigmatic and uncertain presence, and a question mark hangs over just who they are to each other really.
Trailing and doubling is everywhere in Desire Lines, as looks connect bodies in a kind of choreography, and purposes remain veiled beyond a mysterious dance of leading and following, diverging and absorbing. Pastimes are undertaken, too, that embrace a renaissance of plantlife knowledge and handcraft. Baskets are woven, and herbs are picked and sorted for medicinal purposes and calming the hallucinations of fevers. Among more esoteric and alarming encounters with nature, a caterpillar is drawn from a throat. The hazy, mutable quality of the film makes everything play out like a vision from a nap on the forest floor in summer. Certainly, conversations about a mushroom living in a tree root that transmits stories, and a bat flying for years toward the sun before collapsing in an exhausted trance, are not drawn from everyday banality.
Night vision goggles show a tied-up figure in bushes in scorched purple and orange. A particularly stunning and ghostly scene shimmers with the super-impositions of figures. In this unsettling yet serene meditation on the oneness of the universe and our awkward inability to ever be quite all in with togetherness or solitude, D.O.P.s Ivan Markovic and Jenny Lou Ziegel infuse every frame with an exciting sense of alchemic transformation. This is not a film to understand in any conventional sense, but rather, to feel and experience.
Director: Dane Komljen
Screenwriters: Dane Komljen, Tanja Sljivar
Producers: Natasa Damnjanovic, Vladimir Vidic
Cinematographers: Ivan Markovic, Jenny Lou Ziegel
Editor: Marko Ferkovic
Cast: Ivan Cuic, Branka Katic, Petja Golec Horvat, Rok Juricic
Sound Design, Music: Jakov Munizaba
Production companies: Dart Film (Serbia), Mak Film (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Marletti (Bosnia-Herzegovina), seriousFilm (Netherlands), Piper (Croatia), Flaneur Films (Germany)
Sales: Square Eyes
Venue: Sarajevo (In Focus)
In Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Arabic
107 minutes
