The germ of every successful and carefully thought-out film and every other story is perhaps the most expedient to look for precisely in that delicate combination of personally experienced on the one hand, and that which is generally understandable on the other. It is even better if those two poles are integrally intertwined and if they complement each other, and if their genuineness, or at least a sufficiently strong and convincing illusion of the same, is one of the most important integrative factors. Dabom, maybe everything listed above is too much to ask from a film story, that is, a story that essentially more or less tends to be communicated to the public/the world, regardless of whether by that we mean viewers with a more refined taste at film festivals and similar occasions or a wider the audience that encounters a specific film primarily in the darkness of cinema halls of this or that subtype or profile, including multiplexes, which know how to open their doors (or more precisely - odskrinu) and for arthouse creations that appeal to a more select or less numerous audience. And, of course, there are many obstacles and pitfalls that films need to overcome and overcome during that fundamentally uncertain and not necessarily pleasant journey.
Film Lost Country by screenwriter and director Vladimir Perišić, made in a French-Serbian-Luxembourgish-Croatian co-production, with a production contribution from Qatar as well, is one of the more recent achievements that tend to combine the above and the above-explained. Perhaps the reading of the influence of the specifically personal into this story is imposed lightly, bearing in mind Perišić's family story and the fact that the character of the mother, certainly the second most important in this film story of his, is actually the character of an important screw in the system of Milosevic's rule, and perhaps also the main propagandist. of that freakish regime from the end of the last century, but what is certainly more potent and relevant for any analysis is the impression that the audience was presented with a story of naturalistic grayness in which emotions play an extremely important role as a kind of catalyst for a good deed the one that is born and, searching for its final form, stirs in the soul of the young hero, the son of the so-called lady, who in the midst of student and civil protests in the second half of Milošević's ruling era is driven by ever more violent and ever more penetrating women and urges of necessary (self) emancipation, which , here, proved to be a significant common denominator in the case of more popular films presented in the programs of the recently concluded 29th Festival of Original Films in Belgrade, at which, after all, this movie experienced its national/Serbian premiere, after which it found itself in regular cinema distribution.
Simply put – Lost Country is the story of a sociable and sensitive teenager, a junior high school student who, in the wake of the aforementioned protests of a wider and wider scope, becomes more and more aware of his mother's role in the survival of the government against which, one would say, almost everyone else from the boy's immediate environment, where the boy and mother have a particularly deep, sincere and sincerely experienced relationship, and also a relationship of pronounced mutual familiarity and complementarity. In these few sentences, practically the entire plot of this second long feature film by Perišić is expressed, as it is easy to detect, a film with a deliberately reduced narrative weft and structure, thus paving the way first of all for the film story of the state and the film story, which in the first place is carried by an increasingly powerful the hero's need for metamorphoses as unavoidable stations of personal and radical maturation.
In that aspect of itself Lost Country is a film in its place, with a noticeable departure from the more radically understood and applied notion of a slow arthouse film in the case of its predecessor, Perišić's full-length debut, the film Ordinary People, and on the trail of what we recognize as the author's approach of Alice Winokur, Perišić's frequent collaborator in the position of co-screenwriter, and more widely known for the script for the film Mustang, as well as screenwriting and directing credits when it comes to films Disorder, Proxima i Memories of Paris, of which the last mentioned is perhaps the closest to the film in terms of spirit and tone Lost Country. Of course, the question is (after all, the one that openly worries the main character as well) whether the dimensions of responsibility, ethics and essential complexity of human beings, their mental and soul structures, and the possibility of even more convincing separation of public personas from what is personal and intimate... cognitive and other possibilities of the still small Stefan. During almost the entire course of the story of this film, he examines the price of life, and especially the price of life's dignity, with the ever-increasing weight of realizations that, as it becomes more and more certain, are definitely impossible to avoid. As Giorgio Agamben points out in the study Holy man Sovereign power and bare life (translated by Milena Babić, published ten years ago by Karpos Books): "The concept of ``a life unworthy of living'' is, according to Binding, of essential importance, because it allows finding an answer to the legal question that he himself is preparing to answer: ʼshould impunity for the destruction of life be limited, as is the case in current law (except in cases of emergency) to suicide, or can it be extended to the murder of third parties?ʼ The solution to the problem, according to Binding, depends precisely on the answer to the following question : Are there those human lives that have lost the characteristics of a legal good to such an extent that their continuation, both for their owners and for society, permanently loses all value?'" Of course, here the terms "murder" and "suicide" should be replaced by "destruction", but the essence and the common thread and essence remain the same - what is the price of life with knowledge that, it seems, cannot be overcome, and in relation to that - is there complete freedom with at least only an implicit knowledge of guilt from the personal environment and worldview framework. So, in the conceptual sense Lost Country leaves a sufficiently suggestive impression, the problem, as many times before, throughout the history of not only politically colored but also broadly understood film, is in the realization itself.
Namely, if we leave aside everything presented so far in this presentation, as well as the excellent acting and acting partnership of young Jovan Ginić and Jasna Đuričić, the problems with this film arise on several levels - for example, in terms of the setting and distribution of the remaining characters. Although obviously more ephemeral, they are here given to the point of croki, with the oppositional side characters within this story being burdened with hasty bigotry and general bigotry, even towards the apparently young and fundamentally innocent Stefan, leading to a debatable egalitarianism between the two ideological poles of the era. . The film sometimes moves with difficulty under the burden of tempting, but essentially first-ball symbolism (Stefan at one point closes the windows of the house in order to drown out the noise of opposition protests and that famous banging of pans, while the film offers happier and more effective solutions in that aspect - in, admittedly, to the unnecessarily long scene of the water polo practice during which the teammates openly avoid passing the ball to Stefan even when he is in the immediate vicinity of the undefended goal, and intriguingly is an ambivalent line in which Stefan's medical examination, although this does not happen often at that age, reveals signs of farsightedness, and this symbolism is interesting to weigh and analyze, especially if you bear in mind the very end of the film). The use of ancient filmstrip is also questionable, which did provide a markedly grainy texture to the picture, but the kanda was not necessary in terms of underlining the spirit and recreations of that era - not only that the viewers always readily and openly react to this technological deception when a story begins in front of them that otherwise, it manages to capture their attention and stimulate a system of emotional response to what comes to them in terms of stimuli from the screen/cinema screen, but also because what would happen if that kind of understand mimeticism more literally and exclusively, the film's story was more appropriate (albeit more difficult for the eye) recording electronics of the late nineties. Particularly questionable, however, are the scenes of street protests, which should have been avoided in the conditions of the impossibility of creating a striking illusion in that area of this film, because here we get a mere illustration that lacks cameraman's ambitions, more detailed staging and the number of extras/actors. When it comes to the segments that concern the aspect of the story that focuses on student and wider protests and 1996. year, the rather intrusive attempts to forcefully connect that part of Serbian history with the still current Kosovo branch of local troubles (so that in this film there are also mentions of Adem Demaći, who was imprisoned at the time, the support of Pristina/Albanian students, and Stefanov sympathy, a girl decorated with an all-seeing eye drawn on her forehead, also has predictions of imminent war crimes in Kosovo). This is followed by the extremely hasty use of the already over-emphasized, overly saccharine grandiose and not at all subtle Bayaga song with all the lines "what no one can do, you can do... let's reach the dream together, alone at the crossroads of the worlds... convince me that life is beautiful against all rules and laws, come out with me into the world, these are days of high voltage...".
total intake, Lost Country is a step forward for Perišić, who in the case of the film Ordinary People provided in the first place a successful bluff and an attempt to imitate and appropriate the styles of the then slow arthouse film with large ambitions and equally large silences and essential voids; Lost Country it seems more lived, more sincere, and even its shortcomings can be observed and analyzed with more zest and ardour, with more tangible grounds for it. On the other hand, and despite the evident festival success, this film remains only an indication of the possibility of film stories to embrace and convincingly present to us the darkness of the Milosevic years, whose echoes still ring in our (collective) ears and to a visible extent continue to shape what we live and we strive to rein in the here and now.
