Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day
Written and directed by Ivona Juka
Starring Emir Hadzihafizbegovic, Elmir Krivalic and Dado Cosic
Classification N/A; 131 minutes
Opens in select theatres May 30
There are a number of scenes in the new Croatian drama Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day that feel not pulled but torn, passionately and violently, from the pages of history.
There is the moment early on in which, during the Second World War, Nazi forces separate the Jews from the Serbs in the middle of a field. A sequence later on in which the assault of a gay character is so brutal – the sound of clubs echoing on the soundtrack threatens to pound in your own head. And, finally, a scene toward the end, in which the dead black-and-white past suddenly flips to a fully alive, full-colour future.
At so many points, director Ivona Juka’s ambitious treatise on art, friendship, love and politics in 1950s Yugoslavia raises your pulse and catches your breath. Yet taken as a whole, the film doesn’t quite add up, its epic scope chopped up into sometimes engrossing, sometimes merely digestible chunks.
There is so much heart in this Croatia-Canada co-production – Croatia’s official entry to the Academy Awards earlier this year – but the beats are too infrequent.
A scene from Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day.Capital Motion Pictures
Largely set on Barren Island, which housed a real-life Yugoslavian prison in the 1950s under the rule of communist strongman Josip (Tito) Broz, Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day focuses on a group of four friends – artists and filmmakers – whose sexual orientation thrusts them into a whirlwind of persecution, terror and violence.
While the film opens up with a lush and romantic sex scene between Lovro (Dado Cosic) and Nenad (Djordje Galic), life quickly turns dark for the pair – a cold reality that Juka embraces with commendable if grim determination.
Although the performances are strong and Juka’s arguments against bigotry and fascism are sincere, the filmmaking carries an air of conventionality, its images stark but somehow superficial at the same time.
By the point in which Juka is clearly hoping her audience will break down in tears, there’s not so much a sense of heartbreak as mild frustration. Somehow, this should feel more powerful than it actually is.
