Film Review: Here (Tu, 2003)

Croatian cinema during first decades of country’s independence failed to leave the shadow of its Yugoslav past. Most notably it reflected in Croatian film makers’ obsession of making their films as different from Serbian as possible. And the most obvious route was to make them dark, depressive, serious and humourless, thus not allowing audience to mistake them for Serbian crowd pleasing comedies and action thrillers. One of the film makers that embodied this paradigm is Zrinko Ogresta, whose 2003 drama Here represents all the good and bad things about early 21st Century Croatian cinema.

The film has anthology structure and is made of six stories loosely connected through characters that appear in various segments. The first segment takes place during 1990s war and shows group of Croatian Army soldiers stationed in abandoned village where they would react very differently to mentally challenged young man and his attempts to tend to a pet animal. Next stories take place after the war in contemporary Croatia, country which was victorious yet many of its citizens, including all protagonists, turned out to be losers. Reasons for that include drug addiction, divorces, alcoholism and loneliness.

Here is competently directed film and checks all the marks necessary for success on foreign film festivals. Its relatively good reputation among non-Croatian critics isn’t that surprising. Ogresta had good fortune of having very capable cast at his disposal and, what is even more important, ability to use their talents, unlike many of his colleagues that tend to direct Croatian actors on film in the same way they would direct them at stage. Some members of the cast leave better impression than others, most notably formidable character actor Ivo Gregurević in the role of alcoholic television star. Another great performance is given by Zlatko Crnković as an elderly man who allows himself to believe that the young German female tourist would like to spend meaningful time with him.

Those good performances, however, are wasted in film that like, so many anthology films, have segments of varying quality. Script by Ogresta and Josip Mlakić, at times tend to add some of Croatian politics into the content. Ogresta, who had reputation of right-winger and one of the rare supporters of ruling Croatian Democratic Party during Tudjman’s years, could have easily used the segment about elderly gentleman as commentary on Croatian-German relations and his own disappointment with Germany, which was one of the staunchest proponents of Croatian independence in early 1990s, abandoning its ally and allowing the country to be taken over by former Communist party at the start of 21st Century. This aspect of the film is hard to miss due to rather explicit symbolism at the very end, which looks both grotesque and lame at the same time. But it is very unlikely that most Croatian viewers would care to notice about those details today. Here, like so many Croatian films, didn’t have much audience in its time either. And those who go through its depressive hour and half of running time would quickly realised why viewers stayed away.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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