Riders

Jahaci

Staragara

VERDICT: Two unlikely Balkan bikers and a Slavic Pixie Dream Girl share an eventful road trip in director Dominik Mencej's slight but sweet semi-homage to 'Easy Rider'.

Fresh from its warmly received world premiere in competition at Sarajevo film festival, Slovenian drama Riders is a bittersweet nostalgia-driven road movie which pays affectionate, knowing homage to Dennis Hopper’s Hollywood counterculture classic, Easy Rider (1969). This coming-of-age story is fairly conventional in style and content, but the laidback charm and natural chemistry of its youthful leads just about makes the trip worthwhile. Praise from viewers in Sarajevo for the film’s precisely observed use of locally specific slang, humour and period detail, as well as the presence of popular Serbian screen veteran Nikola Kojo in a main role, suggest first-time feature director Dominik Mencej could likely have a regional hit on his hands. Wider travel prospects beyond the Balkans will be more limited, but festivals might see mileage in booking this unusually sunny tale from a cinematic region normally associated with glum tragedies and war stories.

Riders opens in a sleepy backwater village in rural Slovenia in 1999, a new country still emerging from the bloody break-up of the old Yugoslavia. Newly fired from his postman job for stealing the mail, Anton (Petja Labovic) is a hot-headed 21-year-old rebel without a cause, desperate to throw off the crushing weight of home and history and race off in search of freedom. Anton’s best friend Tomasz (Timon Sturbej) is more socially conservative and religiously devout, but he secretly feels similarly stifled by his narrow routine and his grieving, overbearing mother. After viewing an inspirational film on VHS cassette, unnamed here (perhaps for rights reasons) but heavy telegraphed as Easy Rider, the endearingly clueless pair hatch an outlandish plan to steal a pair of puny moped bikes, customise them into comically pimped-up choppers, and head out on the open highway. They are looking for adventure, or whatever comes their way.

Initially these unlikely road warriors only intend to visit Slovenia’s capital city of Lubljana, where Anton hopes to reconnect with his estranged girlfriend, now a college student. But their plans are knocked off course by unexpected encounters with Ana (Anja Novak), an amusingly feisty nun on the run from a mob of angry convent sisters, and Peter (Kojo), a grizzled old-school biker that Anton initially makes the mistake of insulting. Following a series of prickly stand-offs and fateful reunions, this quartet of ill-matched misfits eventually agree to join forces and embark on a longer road trip to the sunny Croatian coast together. Along the way there are inevitable mishaps, emotional confessions, revelatory drug experiences, fraught confrontations, random tragedies, sexual encounters and other life lessons.

Riders covers familiar dramatic terrain in a mostly routine manner. The psychological landscape that Menkej maps out here is consistently low-res, rendering his characters in broad strokes and primary colours. Anton’s constant adolescent bad-boy shtick soon gets tiresome, just as Tomasz’s sullen air of wholesome virginal innocence drags a little. Ana, of course, is a total Slavic Pixie Dream Girl, a romantic prize for the two male leads to fight over, and thus learn something profound about their sacred bond of male friendship. You know, Deep Guy Stuff.

That said, Mencej’s handsomely shot road movie does have some compensating charms. The allusions to Easy Rider, right down to artful recreations of actual shots from Hopper’s film, offer niche movie-geek pleasures to a particularly nerdy section of the audience, this reviewer included. A recurring hallucinatory vision also lends the story a faintly supernatural edge, tapping into underlying themes of religious faith, mortality and mysticism. Mencej and his cinematographer Janez Stucin find lyrical visual tableaux in the edgelands on the fringes of cities, deserted rail yards, empty beaches and magical nature vistas. Luca Ciut’s attractively wistful string-driven score also helps do some of the emotional heavy lifting in a lightweight biker movie that is ultimately born to be mild.

Director: Dominik Mencej
Screenplay: Boris Grgurovic, Dominik Mencej
Cast: Petja Labovic, Timon Šturbej, Anja Novak, Nikola Kojo, Elma Jukovic
Cinematography: Janez Stucin
Editing: Matic Drakulic, Andrej Nagode
Producers: Miha Cernec, Danijel Pek, Igor Princic, Srdjan Sarenac, Milan Stojanovic
Production companies: Staragara Productions (Slovenia), Antitalent Produkcija (Croatia), Sense Production (Serbia), Transmedia (Italy), Novi Film (Slovenia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition)
In Slovenian
110 minutes