A perennial guest, occasional host and unofficial mascot at Sarajevo Film Festival, local hero Danis Tanovic is back once again this year with the opening night gala world premiere, My Late Summer. The only Bosnian Oscar-winner to date, for his bleakly funny Balkan war parable No Man’s Land (2001), the 55-year-old writer-director has explored multiple genres and styles since, from politically charged docu-dramas to long-form TV projects and English-language thrillers featuring international stars like Colin Farrell and Famke Jansen.
This time, Tanovic is operating in a lighter register than usual, directing and co-writing a female-driven rom-com with a light sprinkling of midlife melancholy. The cumulative effect is modestly charming and sporadically amusing, but this pan-Balkan co-production never quite hits the target either as sharp-witted comedy or insightful drama. Following its Sarajevo debut, My Late Summer is more likely to garner local love than global interest.
The film’s main screenplay credit belongs to its engaging star, Anja Matkovic. She plays Maja, a 30-ish woman who embarks on sentimental journey to a sleepy holiday island off the Croatian coast just as the summer tourist season is fading. Agitated after learning she is the illegitimate daughter of one of the island’s most celebrated citizens, a wealthy pillar of the community who has recently died, Maja plans to legally challenge his surviving family for her share of inheritance. But while she lingers on the island, stuck in legal limbo, she stumbles into working as a barmaid for the town’s laidback mayor Icho (Goran Navojec), a mischievous but likeable old-school socialist who makes a handsome living from his quayside bar and secret marijuana plantation.
One regular at Icho’s bar is Sasa (Uliks Fehmiu), a soulfully handsome 50-ish writer newly returned to Croatia after long exile in New York. Predictably, his flirtatious chemistry with Maja soon blossoms into a full-blown affair. Even more predictably, their blissful sunset swims and hot sex sessions can not last, as family secrets and messy baggage get in the way. In the process, Maja turns from Slavic Pixie Dream Girl to tragic diva, devastated that her brief holiday fling looks unlikely to turn into the life-changing long-term romance she was apparently expecting after a week of casual dating. But her disillusion serves as a liberating life lesson, the belated coming-of-age implied by the film’s title.
Around this slender central plot, Matkovic and Tanovic assemble a lively background chorus of small-town eccentrics, incompetent policemen, failed lotharios, trigger-happy grandmothers and more. There are jokes here about former Yugoslavian dictator Marshall Tito that will not make much sense outside the Balkans, plus plenty of slapstick humour that probably will. All of which is modestly engaging on a soapy rom-com level, but ultimately fairly inconsequential, conventional and clumsy by Tanovic’s standards. Case in point: a crucial sequence featuring a stampede of stoned cows should have been much funnier, or even scarier, than it ends up on screen. A gloriously silly comic concept falls flat due to sloppy, low-energy execution.
My Late Summer is not devoid of charm. As an exercise in cinematic escapism, it is effortlessly easy on the senses, as any film should be that uses Croatia’s sun-bleached coastline and the turquoise Adriatic sea as its handsome visual backdrop. Constrained by a narrow budget, Tanovic and his team shot the story in sequence, capturing several scenes in single extended shots. This creates an agreeably loose, freewheeling energy that suits the more indie-movie dramatic interludes, but is less effective when the tighter choreography of comedy is required. Music features heavily, both as score and diegetic detail, with pleasing prominence given to Slovenian art-punk provocateurs Laibach and rousing Yugoslavian anti-fascist partisan songs.
Director: Danis Tanovic
Screenplay: Anja Matkovic, Nikola Kuprešanin, Danis Tanovic
Cast: Anja Matkovic, Uliks Fehmiu, Goran Navojec, Mario Knezovic, Marija Škaricic, Mirela Brekalo, Snježana Sinovcic, Luka Juricic, Boris Ler, Ivana Rošcic, Jadranka Matkovic
Cinematography: Miloš Jacimovic
Editor: Redžinald Šimek
Music: Livina Tanovic
Producers: Lana Matic, Boris T. Matic
Production companies: Propeler Film (Croatia), Obala Art Centar (Bosnia), Baš Celik (Serbia), Tramal Films (Slovenia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (opening gala screening)
In Serbo-Croatian
98 minutes
