Filmed around 1988/1989, this movie manages to do what many movies in the decades that followed - paint a more or less genuine portrait of a Dalmatian town (Split in this case) as it once was. The mentality of certain types of people to which the main characters belong is spot on, a bit of a caricature, but genuine, as anyone who lived there can verify, with all their positive and negative sides.
Apart from Bua touches, if lightly (far from a full out attack) and far from centrally, upon subjects that only a few years later would become taboo in some aspects(pedophiles inside the catholic church for example), as the church grew nearly untouchable in free Croatia, especially since it was made for TV Zagreb, which, after becoming the Croatian national television had and still has a policy of censorship.
What raises this movie further are the persistent and painful failures (and, frankly, an overall lack of care) of the movies that followed in the nineties at mimicking (or even at trying to mimic), say, the dialects of the parts of Dalmatia the movies were set (imagine a group of actors playing genuine Scotsmen while speaking with Irish, Cockney, Geordie and Jamaican accents a dialogue made Scottish by adding clichés and written by someone who has no real idea how Scottish sounds in reality, without all of that being an intentional joke? That's pretty much the Croatian cinema of the 90's in a nutshell and it still hasn't improved all that much). Even high profile, "good" movies suffered from that (Maral, Kako je počeo rat na mom otoku etc. etc.).
Not that I should be writing this on a site laughably unwilling and unable to comprehend even the difference between, say, the Croatian and Serbian language systems.
It's a simple feel-good movie, hardly enlightening, far from hilarious as a comedy (though some things do inspire chuckles), but more "daring" than many that followed, with some genuinely good acting from Vidović and Guberina. A window into a world that dies more and more in a town whose own culture has been almost assassinated nowadays. And I'm proud more than ever to have met the late director of it.
Apart from Bua touches, if lightly (far from a full out attack) and far from centrally, upon subjects that only a few years later would become taboo in some aspects(pedophiles inside the catholic church for example), as the church grew nearly untouchable in free Croatia, especially since it was made for TV Zagreb, which, after becoming the Croatian national television had and still has a policy of censorship.
What raises this movie further are the persistent and painful failures (and, frankly, an overall lack of care) of the movies that followed in the nineties at mimicking (or even at trying to mimic), say, the dialects of the parts of Dalmatia the movies were set (imagine a group of actors playing genuine Scotsmen while speaking with Irish, Cockney, Geordie and Jamaican accents a dialogue made Scottish by adding clichés and written by someone who has no real idea how Scottish sounds in reality, without all of that being an intentional joke? That's pretty much the Croatian cinema of the 90's in a nutshell and it still hasn't improved all that much). Even high profile, "good" movies suffered from that (Maral, Kako je počeo rat na mom otoku etc. etc.).
Not that I should be writing this on a site laughably unwilling and unable to comprehend even the difference between, say, the Croatian and Serbian language systems.
It's a simple feel-good movie, hardly enlightening, far from hilarious as a comedy (though some things do inspire chuckles), but more "daring" than many that followed, with some genuinely good acting from Vidović and Guberina. A window into a world that dies more and more in a town whose own culture has been almost assassinated nowadays. And I'm proud more than ever to have met the late director of it.
