DIRECTORS ‘Fortnight
The moray eel is this eel fish from the Mediterranean basin whose sharp teeth and sinuous suppleness have legendary reflections. Besides its scientific name, Muraena helena, which evokes the beautiful Helena, the most famous woman in Greek mythology. Between the marine animal and Julija, the teenage heroine of Murina, a slender growth irresistibly attracted by diving and the seabed, takes shape a little more than an affinity: an obscurely allegorical part. This beautiful and intriguing first feature film by Croatian Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic, in the credits of which Martin Scorsese appears as executive producer, presents itself as a sort of enigmatic tale, a variation in murky waters on the eternal story of beauty brought to life. cage (and therefore that of Bluebeard) who is desperately trying to escape.
The film immediately hypnotizes with its superb inaugural and underwater sequence which shows Julija (Gracija Filipovic) in the company of her father, left as every day to fish for moray eels with a harpoon. Ante (Leon Lucev), a former captain converted into an establishment owner in the paradisiacal scenery of the Kornati Islands, holds his family under the yoke of an untimely grumbling, while the young girl dawdles all day in a swimsuit, does not live than to immerse yourself in the silvery waves of the Adriatic, sometimes called to order by an anguished mother (Danica Curcic).
This precarious balance changes when Javier arrives, friend of Ante, former suitor of his wife and big notorious fortune, ready to invest in local tourism. Received with great fanfare, the distinguished guest is not insensitive to the nubile charm of Julija, who, for her part, sees in him a lifeline, someone who could tear him away from his midst. The businessman thus reactivates, within this small world, a hitherto dormant network of desires, aspirations, fears and resentments.
A range of hypotheses
The film has no other program than to explore this web of relationships between a handful of characters who seek to look good, pretend an understanding that turns out to be infested with pretense. Desire is of course there, but remains suspended until the end, the director observing rather how it circulates from one to another. Julija’s adolescence, jealously protected by her father, is of course opposed to the failures and tensions of adults, who unlike her no longer radiate, but ruminates on past mistakes. The sea and its splendid shivering expanses mark the dividing line between these two worlds: that of social relations whose economic reason is law and money is the fuel, and that of interiority marked by a dreamlike floating which is also the place where impulses are born.
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