Tatjana Bozic: Happily Ever After
Does she wants too much, Tatjana Bozic? From Life and from the Film, she has made and in which she is the main character? A film about a woman looking back at her love life to find out what went wrong in previous relationships – and about what she can take from that in terms of understanding herself. And get on with her life as a mother.
You can’t get it all, her friends say, when she, in the present layer of the film, is complaining that her marriage with Dutch Rogier, with whom she has her child, does not work perfectly. You want everybody to love you, that’s the problem, her father says to her. Mother died, what would she have adviced me, she asks her father, should I leave the marriage? Your mother would have said Yes, the father replies.
She is a handful, Tatjana, and she does not hide that in the film about herself. On the contrary, you get very close to her, you see her suffer, you see and hear her being unbearably pathetic but also cheerful and direct. In between you reflect on whether you watch a private or a personal film.
She wants the film to be funny. And it is, especially when she is visiting her ex-boyfriends. Pawel, Russian Pawel, is the one who analyses, if you can use that word, her best. They were together for four years, before he chose to live with another Tatjana. The visiting of the past is a great idea for the film, the ex-lovers are from different cultures and that makes the film lighter. The mother of the Englishman did not like Tatjana! The Russians drink too much! Klichés but still, Balkan mentality, British stiff upperlip and Russian melancholy do not fit together.
Unfortunately the director also wants to send a message. In several wordless sequences you see faces of women… close-ups, they look at you, apparently to kind of ask us about/feel ashamed of the condition of women today. I don’t think it suits a story which has already mant facets and is so rich anyway and it does not generalise, on the contrary it has a focus on one individual and her effort to find out about herself searching for Love. That is more than enough, there is no need to include the whole world. She wants too much, Tatjana Bozic.
Holland, Croatia, 2013, 83 mins.
