23/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: Vladimir Perišić returns with his first film in thirteen years, set during the 1996 elections in Belgrade in what was then Yugoslavia

When introducing Lost Country [+see also:
trailer
interview: Vladimir Perišić
film profile], his first feature film since his 2009 feature debut Ordinary People [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Vladimir Perisic: Ordinary …
film profile], Serbian director Vladimir Perišić made a point to describe his 13-year long dry spell not as being in the desert, but rather as “being born in the desert,” without knowing it is even possible to get out. His new film, premiering like the last one in Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival, not only deals with similar feelings of paralysis, solitude and hopelessness, but seems to chart their origins within a post-Yugoslavia context. 

Teenager Stefan (newcomer Jovan Ginic) is first introduced in an idyllic scene in the countryside, picking up walnuts with his grandfather and chatting about the latter’s glory days as part of the Yugoslav water polo team at the Olympics. It seems the kind of nostalgic talk that would be more appropriate to the present day than to 1996, when the film is set; just as it shows a certain pride in being Yugoslavian, it also suggests that already then, some believed the country’s glory days were behind them. Already, a sense of wistfulness and regret was brewing.

But the quiet and often blank-faced Stefan is just a normal kid, concerned with the matters of his age: walking to school with his friends, making eyes at a cute girl in his class. He also cares a somewhat unusual amount about his mother Marklena (Jasna Đuričić, familiar most recently from Quo Vadis, Aida? [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jasmila Žbanić
film profile]), a stylish woman who raises her son alone and works long hours at her job. She hugs him often, asks for his opinions about her outfits (“It’s not too revealing?”): there is something slightly unhealthy and borderline manipulative about their relationship, but it is hardly uncommon and Perišić does not press the point, as if to acknowledge the fact that Stefan is still young and still changing. The film in fact captures well the sense in youth of being only a sketch of a person, a draft still to be revised, a series of tentative experiments. 

It’s a general sense of vagueness that immediately clashes with the film’s extremely precise visual style, in sometimes interesting and other times awkward ways. It works in the context of Stefan’s relationship with his mother — the very exact cinematography here (by Sarah Blum and Louise Botkay) cannot lessen the ambiguity of what is an inherently fluctuating dynamic, full of things implied and unsaid. If anything, those simple, stereotypical images of a loving mother-and-son relationship (hugging, hanging out at home or in the car) only make the strangeness of their actual rapport more apparent. It’s a visual strategy that is less convincing when it comes to other elements of the film that Perišić and co-writer Alice Winocour choose to keep very simple and unambiguous. Stefan and his school friends, for example, behave in a very calm and serious way that feels unrealistic and forced, an impression underlined by the film’s calm rhythm and steady style. It simply does not feel like there is a true friendship there, or much of anything else. 

Perišic is perhaps trying to start from a clean slate, in order to then complicate it as the film goes on. We hear right from the film’s start, on the car radio and in the school corridors, about upcoming elections in the country, with the Milosević regime already hinting that it is ready to do anything to stay in power. News reaches Stefan and his friends of student protests against the regime, with all kids agreeing to participate. In parallel to these developments, Marklena’s job also comes into sharper focus, but it is hardly a coincidence: she is the spokesperson for Milosević’s party, the one speaking on the radio about stolen elections to undermine the democratic process. As the government’s tactics against protesting students become more violent, Stefan’s friends become more radicalised, and less patient with their friend who essentially refuses for the longest time to pick a side. 

Even then, however, this change feels rather too neat to be fully believable. Perišić dilutes that impression somewhat by delaying proceedings, stretching them out and remaining with Stefan as he writhes in indecision. But the feeling remains of an ultimately rather contrived structure, further emphasised by the clunky metaphor of Stefan literally losing his eyesight throughout the film. Lost Country is a despairing and pained film, shot with an emotional reserve that suggests torrents of sorrow running just below the surface; it is only a shame that when those emotions do emerge, they feel rather too sleek and simple to ring perfectly true or fully do justice to an extremely difficult situation. 

Lost Country was produced by Easy Riders Films (France), KinoElektron (France), Trilema Films (Serbia), Kinorama (Croatia), Red Lion (Luxembourg), and ARTE France Cinéma (France). International sales are handled by Memento International.