Ines Mrenica - klixMagazin
Set in Yugoslavia in 1957, director Ivona Juka’s “Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day” follows four close friends, renowned filmmakers, whose sexual orientation stirs up conservative members of the Communist Party.
In the late 1950s, when television screens invaded homes and with them the speeches of Comrade Tito, cinematography was a powerful ideological tool. Those who worked in film had more or less all the conditions, but they had to follow the instructions of propaganda, and even if they dared to question the system, their careers would end abruptly, and their films and ideals would be in the bunker. It was the way of lonely rivers that flow to the sea, as beautiful Unchained Melody inspired the author on her celluloid path.
Although set in the delicate years of Yugoslavia, “Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day” by director Ivona Juka is a timeless story about how politics will always find a way to destroy those who dare to raise their heads above the subdued masses, question what they shouldn’t and infect someone else with that virus of suspicion. And someone different. The system guarded by the secret services then finds your biggest secret, and in this case it’s homosexuality, at that time a great sin and an unnatural phenomenon that must be sanctioned.
An epic lesson in how history hates lovers
Lovro (Dado Ćosić), Nenad (Đorđe Galić), Stevan (Slaven Došlo) and Ivan (Elmir Krivalić) are former partisan soldiers who proved themselves in the fight against the Nacis, when they came for Jews and Serbs in black uniforms. War heroes, well-bred and well-groomed boys, want to realize their ideals a little later in a large film studio under the paws of state propagadists. However, when the enthusiastic director Lovro tries to insert a scene into his film that does not correspond to the comunist regime, his co-workers and parents begin to suffer unfathomable consequences in the form of professional degradation.
The Propaganda Office promptly appoints a simple-minded but above all loyal raincoat-wearing apparatchik Emir Servar (Emir Hadžihafizbegović) to head the film studio, who is faced with a difficult and not so cinematic task - to sabotage the work of four artists who are suspected of being homosexuals. Like the cold-blooded Stasi officer from the German film “The Lives of Others” (Oscar-winning “Das Leben der Anderen, 2006), he will first have to talk to himself and his animosities by observing their lives. However, by an unconscious mistake, he will send them to a place where they may be able to escape and return as physiologically living people, but exclusively as spiritual corpses.
Shot in black and white, where there is as much color as freedom, “A Beautiful Evening, a Beautiful Day” has impressive cinematography (Dragan Ruljančić), almost a school-like framed noir comic book. In this spectrum of fifty shades of gray, film-savvy viewers begin to question their personal relationship to life, freedom, the present, the past, forgiveness and love. The film represents one of the most ruthless insights into human nature that cinema (possibly on a global scale) has ever known.
Although a film (according to the proven Hitchcock theory) is only as good as the convincing main villain, and in this case it is the masterful actor Emir Hadžihafizbegović who stole every frame he walked into with his appearance and facial expression, the main character of the film is you sitting in the audience. The deceived expectation occurs when you think that the characters figure in a plot line in which there are no more big surprises and that the dramatic rhythm fails because the main character has absolutely no flaws. However, such a foolish enthusiasm is the last thing a comunist system needs, which is not only corrupt but also corrupts the individual, and therefore must be punished. That gun on the wall at the beginning fires in the end.
The film contains several explicit scenes of gay sexual intercourse, which, although presented in a naturalistic manner, has a very artistic stylization and a somewhat antique eroticism. While you want to look away from the screen, which is simultaneously pornographic and artistic depiction of gay sex, you are actually on a homophobic test. If you don't leave the cinema, you are ready for the final display of ultimate violence on a rocky area by the sea, a masterfully staged sequence that devastates the viewer, regardless of time, memory, and knowledge of the Yugoslav past. Even Tarantino himself would not be ashamed of the way Juka directs violence (in her case without irony and fun).
In the directorial process of bringing the viewer into a state of shock, Juka puts you in a annoying position that the ideas of the communist manifesto advocated. You are all the same and you should all think and see the same as it was in the historical context of the years film is positioned, when class differences were erased by having unknown roommates move into those in oversized bourgeois apartments overnight. In that setting, paradoxically, for many the most difficult thing was to observe intimate moments of other people's pleasure. Then you realize how powerful the message of this film is and how much it concerns us all. On the importance of questioning all kinds of freedom.
An impressive production, almost unreal technically complex for Croatian standards and conditions, the film was produced by Anita Juka, among other things, with the support of the Sarajevo Cinematography Foundation (in co-production with DEPO), with post-production finalized in Toronto. The music is composed by Michael Brook, edited by Nenad Pirnat, and the actors' miniatures performed by Vojislav Brajović, Dražen Čuček, Goran Grgić and Enes Vejzović are especially striking. Young Bosnian actor Elmir Krivalić also showed exceptional talent in the role of actor Ivan Bota, with the voice and glamourous look of the golden age of Hollywood.
