Nenad Puhovski: Together
Energetic festival director (ZagrebDOX) and producer (Factum) Nenad Puhovski is also a film director, and a very committed one. With his new film he has for years been following people who – with his words – ”were, are or wish to be emotionally engaged with others”. They are very different, but they all want to be together with another person. Their differences and communication skills are reflected in the way the film comes out stylistically. With some characters the director puts up the camera and waits for good moments to happen, with others who could be mentally challenged, he has to put questions to get answers on how Love came to them. It makes the film a bit unbalanced with an intercut editing that goes from one story to the other, and then to yet another one. There are five stories in the film, they each have their own atmosphere, one could call it ”colour” – also emphasized through the use of different music elements.
Having said so, some of the stories sit strong with the viewer. For me the story with the lesbian couple goes close and develops into a touching small drama. Here you sense an intimacy that you can only get if you as a director knows your approach and has achieved the confidence and the respect of both young women in the couple. Some other wordless scenes work fine in terms of rythm and metaphor for happiness – like the one where a couple (those on the photo) do a bed together, or the scene with the widow who are at the cemetery, or the fine scenes with the man in the wheelchair, who challenges the viewer with his direct language: We all fuck!
Truffaut said that if nine out of ten films were about Love, it was one too little. I would not mind if Puhovski goes back to one of the couples and see how it goes og does not go. We can all learn from that!
Croatia, 2009, 87 mins.
