A dating event called Touch of Happiness, held in a labyrinthine Sarajevo hotel and promoted with the company philosophy that people must remember love and their need to share, is the setting for Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska’s surrealistic feature The Happiest Man in the World, which was Macedonia’s Oscar entry, and screened in the Dealing With Past programme of the Sarajevo Film Festival. Tasks and exchanges seem unsurprising and innocuous at first, as participants in name tags, paired at tables with buzzers, answer questions about their preferences for colours and seasons. But we quickly realise this is no standard speed meet-up for romance hopefuls, as an undercurrent of suspicion and tension bubbles over. Sarajevo was, after all, a city besieged for 1,425 days by Serb forces in the Bosnian War of the not-so-long-ago ‘90s, and its unhealed collective wounds mean feeling more, and getting out of one’s comfort zone into greater love and sharing, means increased vulnerability to a festering flipside of hate and division.
The rules of engagement are unclear and shifting, as the war has not ended in terms of the memories and continued invisible lines that haunt and define relationships in Bosnia’s capital. As conflict erupts, some love contenders express discomfort at feeling like guinea pigs in an experiment. We as audience onlookers must consider, faced with the wide variation of attitudes and responses from those gathered for the hotel all-dyaer, what a lab for reconciliation would really take. Bold and outside-the-box, this humanistic, dynamic dissection of a traumatic legacy of ethno-nationalist militarism in the Balkans and its ongoing individual costs is the latest from Teona Strugar Mitevska in a directing career spanning more than two decades. She has often dealt with identity and value clashes, in mid-profile festival films including When the Day Had No Name (2017), a critique of Balkan machismo based on a murder in Skopje that inflamed ethnic tensions, and God Exists, Her Name is Petrunija (2019), about a young woman whose retrieval of a cross from the water in an annual contest challenges the Orthodox Church patriarchy.
Attendees at the latest round of Touch of Happiness must all change into uniforms with sickly pink and green colour schemes, to enhance a sense of cohesion. They may all look of a part, but their stories are harder to reconcile, it soon emerges, as we hone in particularly on one pair. Asja (played as a tough but compassionate presence by Jelena Kordic) is a 45-year-old legal adviser, who considers her career her biggest achievement in life, and throws herself into the assigned dating tasks with the same no-nonsense, pro-active commitment. Though she seems put-together, she struggles, as the offspring of a Serb Orthodox mother and a Muslim father, with a sense of fractured belonging. She’s been matched up with Zoran, an on-edge 43-year-old who works in a bank (an intense Adnan Omerovic). Their preferences put them, promisingly, on the same page — until Zoran confesses that in the war, he was a member of the Army of the Republika Srpska for three years, and shot at his own city. What is more, he thinks he may have hit and injured Asja, who was living near the frontline while Sarajevo was under constant sniper fire. The room swims woozily around her, as we take a dive into more psychologically challenging terrain. Effective visual and aural approximations recreate the impact of trauma and its flashbacks. Contradictory urges to process and to forget, to punish and to be absolved crash up against one another (her desired superpower is to read thoughts and understand; his is amnesia.) As immobilised by shame and self-loathing as he is averse to real responsibility (the title is ironic, of course), Adnan is not portrayed without sympathy, though Mitevska does not let this broken and haunted perpetrator off too easily as another war victim who bowed to herd mentality.
Aside from a gorgeous end shot that lingers over Sarajevo’s skyline as the day darkens like an oil painting, we are holed up scene after scene in the hotel, which works well to create a sense of dislocation from normality and an intensifying claustrophobia. Rooms named after the Swiss cities of Zurich and Basel bring no reassuring illusion of neutrality or affluent security to calm the hallucinatory breaks from reality (imaginatively actualised on screen in choreographed group performance). As painful memories start to flow out, movement and fully being in one’s own body in the present, scars and all, also becomes a way to liberation, as Asja dances for release.
Director: Teona Strugar Mitevska
Writers: Elma Tataragic, Teona Strugar Mitevska
Producers: Labina Mitevska, Sebastien Delloye, Danijel Hocevar, Maria Moller Christoffersen, Vanja Sremac, Amra Baksic Camo, Adis Dapo
Editors: Per K. Kirkegaard
Cinematography: Virginie Saint Martin
Cast: Jelena Kordicc Kuret, Adnan Omerovic, Ksenija Marinkovic, Izudin Bajrovic
Sound: Ingrid Simon, Kristoffer Salting, Viktor Grabar
Production Design: Vuk Mitevski
Costume Design: Monika Lorber
Production companies: Sisters and Brother Mitevski (Macedonia), Entre Chien et Loup (Belgium), Vertigo (Slovenia), Frau film (Denmark), Terminal 3 (Croatia), SCCA/pro.ba (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Belga Productions (Belgium)
Sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Sarajevo (Dealing With the Past)
In Bosnian
95 minutes
