A depressive, cash-strapped thirty-six-year-old consumed by obsession for a Balkan music star throws herself into desperate schemes to get closer to him in Sorella di Clausura (2025), the fourth feature of Serbian, Romania-based director Ivana Mladenovic.
The playfully satirical and bawdy anti-romance screens in the feature competition at Sarajevo Film Festival, after its world premiere at Locarno. Playing Stela is Romanian actress of the moment Katia Pascariu, who garnered international plaudits for her role as a teacher embroiled in a sex-tape scandal in Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021). She fully commits to another unglamorous, outlandish and sometimes naked lead role in which awkward sex and the glaring indignity of life under capitalism in a man’s world are played for merciless black humour and a damning reckoning with the empty illusions of the European Union. Not all the jokes land or delve very deep in a sprawling, chaptered film that sways uncertainly around form and intention, but is diverting enough. A sassy introductory title decries any comparison to truth as “wrong and possibly paranoid.” It’s based on a memoir by Liliana Pelici, with discernible nods to Mladenovic’s late pop star friend Anca Pop, though anything heartfelt in the urge for a tribute has been pushed aside as it goes all in on an unabashedly vulgarity-embracing and absurdist, Radu Jude-style lampoon of modern Romania.
It’s the midst of a housing crisis. Stela’s family, a motley tangle of rowdy dissension and bigotry (Roma are blamed as an easy target for the hardships of “decent Romanians”), is planning to move to a village as a way out of their financial woes. Her uncle’s pension is the only household income, and Stela is under fire for absconding with the last instalment to fund her ticket to a Boban concert. She’s been an infatuated fan of the now white-haired folk crooner, since the age of twelve — so much so that she compares all potential boyfriends to him. She types out frenzied letters to her crush, and plots ways to forge a real-life connection, in an angsty, despairing mood that she laments is no magnet for the shallow men on the dating market.
It would be futile to look for much emotional substance in a stalkerish dynamic played for heavy-handed farce (a make-out scene with a life-size poster of Boban exemplifies the tone.) This relationship is essentially, instead, a metaphor, in a more-bitter-than-sweet comedy attuned to inequalities of power and status in an online and entertainment-obsessed Romania just after its accession to the EU, and the end of euphoria as realities of the financial crisis hit in 2008. Crammed into the unruly melange are cultural and geopolitical references to the rising power of China, and reality television. It doesn’t miss the chance to poke fun at western stereotypes of this region of Europe. “I had forgotten about the picturesque chaos of the Balkans,” Stela adlibs when in disguise as a German negotiating the publishing deal of a NATO manual, in a wacky encounter aimed at a baroquely roundabout resolution of the mess of her love life.
We are in a transactional universe, where image is currency and real emotional connection is elusive. Brownish-yellow apartments crammed with kitsch ornaments evoke a communist-era hangover (D.O.P. Marius Panduru does an impressive job in enveloping us in a sallow claustrophobia.) With little that is coveted or up to date attainable for the citizens, fantasy is the easiest escape. A tabloid article reveals the identity of Boban’s rumoured mistress, Timisoara television starlet Vera Pop (Cendana Trifan). Mad with jealousy, Stela harasses her online, with insults so creative Vera is impressed and eventually offers her a job at her sex products business in Bucharest. Stela grasps at the chance as a potential avenue to Boban — especially when Vera, who is busy with her own madcap plan to re-enact and film her escape from the Eastern Bloc over the Danube, suggests she write a book to impress him. The cryptic title of Sorella di Clausura references a nun’s choir that, we’re told, sings after taking an oath of silence. What comes out here is unapologetically no demure or decisively ordered melody; but the lively ruckus carries the punkish defiance of radical acts, and a refusal of judgy sanctimony.
Director: Ivana Mladenovic
Screenwriters: Ivana Mladenovic, Adrian Schiop, Momir Milosevic
Producers: Ada Solomon, Ivana Mladenovic
Cinematographer: Marius Panduru
Editors: Vanja Kovacevic
Cast: Katia Pascariu, Cendana Trifan, Miodrag Mladenovic, Arnold Kelsch, Catalin Dordea, Adrian Radu
Music: Toni Cutrone, Andrei Dinescu
Production Design: Malina Ionescu
Production companies: microFILM (Romania), Nightswim (Italy), Boogaloo Films (Spain), Dunav 84 (Serbia)
Sales: B Rated International
Venue: Sarajevo (Feature Competition)
In Romanian, Serbian, English
107 minutes
