Page 169 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 169
identity in a notion of the eastern and western european cinema
begins in the city (home audiences of course recognise the capital Ljublja-
na), where one of the lead characters, named Ali, feels bad due to his fail-
ure at the university exams. So after a quarrel with his girlfriend he hits the
road in his deux chevaux, which was a quite popular car in Slovenia at the
time. On his way out of the city, he first takes in his car a hitch hiker named
Smokey, and finally a secretive girl Milena. The three then travel to the sea,
later they drive on cart tracks and totally off any road looking for a deserted
beach. They find such beach and they spend their time there playing, bath-
ing. Some hints about a love triangle are given but not much follows from
it; it looks like that Milena is falling in love with the both boys, but the sto-
ry does not develop much further in any resolution of the love triangle. At
the end Milena jumps from a sea cliff. For two of the three main roles in
the film Hladnik engaged a pair of Serbian actors Milena Dravić and Ljubi-
ša Samardžić, who became highly popular for their role in Branko Bauer’s
comedy about life in so called “youth labour brigades” Prekobrojna (since
there is no official English title this could be translated as “Over the Num-
ber”), which was shot in the same year just before Hladnik shot his mov-
ie. The pair of young actors represented already in the Prekobrojna, what
seemed to be a much-desired nascent Yugoslav identity. Hladnik made use
of the two actor’s image of a young couple looking for “joys of life”. Howev-
er, Hladnik’s film is not any comedy in spite of the fact that what seems to
be a love triangle is interwoven with many comic situations. On the other
hand, at the same time the characters fall repeatedly in bursts of un-moti-
vated laughter, which becomes more understandable only at the end of the
film. Joy and playfulness of the youths, who could have been just of any na-
tionality or ethnic origin, is, as it seems in the carefully chosen moments,
punctured by unexplainable relapses of the main female character in weird
conditions of sudden fear and sorrow. So, Hladnik throughout the movie
hints at some emptiness in a subjectivity, which makes the identity of char-
acters quite ambivalent. At the end, the trauma is revealed in a quite abrupt
way. The explanation, which is given at the end of the movie, seems even
too explicit and it is somehow not in tune with otherwise generally “nou-
velle vague” kind of atmosphere of the film. Nevertheless, the film is one of
the first Yugoslav films, which reflects the emerging urban middle class and
new values of a cosmopolitan part of the younger generation at the time. If
we talk on a different level about this film, we should be reminded of God-
ard and his Pierrot le fou, which happened to be shot three years later than
Hladnik’s “Castle”. Hladnik’s film is one of those black and white films,
167
begins in the city (home audiences of course recognise the capital Ljublja-
na), where one of the lead characters, named Ali, feels bad due to his fail-
ure at the university exams. So after a quarrel with his girlfriend he hits the
road in his deux chevaux, which was a quite popular car in Slovenia at the
time. On his way out of the city, he first takes in his car a hitch hiker named
Smokey, and finally a secretive girl Milena. The three then travel to the sea,
later they drive on cart tracks and totally off any road looking for a deserted
beach. They find such beach and they spend their time there playing, bath-
ing. Some hints about a love triangle are given but not much follows from
it; it looks like that Milena is falling in love with the both boys, but the sto-
ry does not develop much further in any resolution of the love triangle. At
the end Milena jumps from a sea cliff. For two of the three main roles in
the film Hladnik engaged a pair of Serbian actors Milena Dravić and Ljubi-
ša Samardžić, who became highly popular for their role in Branko Bauer’s
comedy about life in so called “youth labour brigades” Prekobrojna (since
there is no official English title this could be translated as “Over the Num-
ber”), which was shot in the same year just before Hladnik shot his mov-
ie. The pair of young actors represented already in the Prekobrojna, what
seemed to be a much-desired nascent Yugoslav identity. Hladnik made use
of the two actor’s image of a young couple looking for “joys of life”. Howev-
er, Hladnik’s film is not any comedy in spite of the fact that what seems to
be a love triangle is interwoven with many comic situations. On the other
hand, at the same time the characters fall repeatedly in bursts of un-moti-
vated laughter, which becomes more understandable only at the end of the
film. Joy and playfulness of the youths, who could have been just of any na-
tionality or ethnic origin, is, as it seems in the carefully chosen moments,
punctured by unexplainable relapses of the main female character in weird
conditions of sudden fear and sorrow. So, Hladnik throughout the movie
hints at some emptiness in a subjectivity, which makes the identity of char-
acters quite ambivalent. At the end, the trauma is revealed in a quite abrupt
way. The explanation, which is given at the end of the movie, seems even
too explicit and it is somehow not in tune with otherwise generally “nou-
velle vague” kind of atmosphere of the film. Nevertheless, the film is one of
the first Yugoslav films, which reflects the emerging urban middle class and
new values of a cosmopolitan part of the younger generation at the time. If
we talk on a different level about this film, we should be reminded of God-
ard and his Pierrot le fou, which happened to be shot three years later than
Hladnik’s “Castle”. Hladnik’s film is one of those black and white films,
167
