A Film a Week is a weekly column on this blog, run on Sunday for our English-language readers and friends, presenting usually local or European festival films to a wider audience. Every review is directly written and not translated.
The idea of
Montenegrin cinema died about the same time Yugoslavia collapsed in
its bloody wars. Since then, there wasn’t much interesting or good
films, the production rate was about one feature film a year (usually
populist comedies and festival circuit misfires,
with just few exceptions like The Ascent). The population of
just above 600,000 inhabitants and minimal academia infrastructure
did not create a good environment for a
budding film scene, and the foundation of national film centre
is only a recent development. In that situation, Prague-educated
writer-director Ivan Marinović and his charming debut feature
The Black Pin are more then good news.
The place is the
peninsula of Luštica, the time is now. People are rushing to sell
the small portions of land they have to whomever that comes first,
usually the Russians. A group of locals has hatched a plan to sell a
big piece of land to a British investment fund interested in building
a resort there. But there’s a catch: an old woman that has the
reputation of a local witch dies before they can make deal with her,
leaving the land to distant relatives scattered from South America to
Australia. The only alternative for them is to convince the local
priest Petar to join their plan.
That could be a
problem, since Petar (Macedonian actor Nikola Ristanovski) is
not much interested in ephemeral things like money as he is
interested in fond memories of his long-gone father, taking care of
his demented mother (Yugoslav icon Seka Sablić in one of her
crazier parts) and trying to bring up his teenage son Đorđe
(débutante Filip Klicov) since his
wife left him. More to the point, Petar is quite misanthropic and
bitter, and is not on particularly good terms with the men (Serbian
character actor Ljubomir Bandović and Croatian chameleon Leon Lučev
among others) who are planning to sell and has no wish to help them.
Can the retired seaman Dondo (Bogdan Diklić, good as always)
help them find some common ground?
The Black Pin
is a bit of slice-of-life bittersweet comedy-dramas that can get lost
in side-plots and sub-plots that go nowhere. Sometimes, that happens
here too, there is a sub-plot or two too much and that time could be
better spent developing meaningful relations between characters and
adding another dimension to their conflict. But the overall feeling
is that Marinović is more interested in the atmosphere and the mood
of the local area than in the plot and character details. Well-acted,
confidently directed and masterfully shot in chiaroscuro contrasts,
The Black Pin works best as a love letter to a place, the
director’s childhood and all the local legends and anecdotes every
Adriatic village has.
The whole set-up is
Mediterranean and Adriatic as it could be, echoing the mentality
plays that are typical for neighbouring
Dalmatian authors like Miljenko Smoje and both Brešans,
late writer Ivo and his filmmaker son Vinko. But The
Black Pin’s biggest influence was legendary Yugoslav-era
filmmaker Živko Nikolić, who tackled the themes of modernity
and freedom (and the lack of it) in traditional, confined, almost
insular societies and family units of Montenegro in different periods
of time. His work was locally colored, mesmerizing, darkly funny, but
also pessimistic. He often lamented that modernity and personal
freedom never stood a real chance in underdeveloped society and the
conservative tendencies only switched forms throughout the time.
Marinović has done
his homework. Like Nikolić, he is locally focused and colourful
in the way he is portraying the area and its people, but his themes
of miscommunication and opposing
world-views are not just mentality play,
they are universal for mankind. But compared to often cynical and
misanthropic Nikolić, Marinović is more light-hearted and actually
cares for his characters. It is obvious that The Black Pin is
a work of passion that can serve as a landmark in Montenegrin cinema.
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