THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Many films take adolescence as their subject, but fewer link it to a historical issue, as does Lost Country, the second feature film by Vladimir Perisic. Born in Belgrade in 1976, trained in France in the ranks of Fémis, the great Parisian film school, from which he graduated in 2003, the filmmaker focuses once again (after Ordinary Peoplein 2009) on the destiny of Serbia, and, even further upstream, of Yugoslavia, his true country of birth, dismembered before his eyes between 1992 and 2003.
The youth he depicts, and which resonates with his own, went through the months of unrest which followed the municipal elections of 1996, canceled on fraudulent grounds by the ruling Socialist Party, led by Slobodan Milosevic (president from 1989 to 2000). ), because they gave the opposition a clear winner. Major demonstrations followed, launched mainly by student circles, brutally repressed by the regime. Adolescence does not find its embodiment here in one of the actors of the revolt, as a scenario won in advance would have decided, but in the sullen face of Stefan (Jovan Ginic), a taciturn high school student, who maintains a vexed, knotty relationship with events.
This knot, more Oedipal than Gordian, takes the name “Mother”. The student is in fact the son of a leader of the Socialist Party, recently promoted to the position of spokesperson, known and hated by all because she regularly delivers press releases through official channels, radio and television. Marklena (the imperious Jasna Djuricic), a coldly elegant government muse, whose first name is a contraction of “Marx” and “Lenin”, exerts a poisonous fascination on her son. Hiding her political maneuvers from his eyes, she coats him with her velvet voice, calling him “my little trailer”as if to condemn him to always remain behind.
Carried with his classmates into the protest movement, distributing leaflets in the high school courtyard, Stefan returns every evening to his mother, who perniciously appropriates him, and, in doing so, taints him politically (depositing a kiss on the son’s cheek, his lipstick marks him with a fatal mark). The “Mother” is indeed this figure that we cannot resist: her face is the image of an impossible homeland, this Yugoslavia in the process of disintegration, a corrupt paradise.
Sentimental lurches
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