MURINA (B+) - Teenage Julija chafes at her dead-end life under her bullying father and subservient mother, a family that gets by on the Croatian coast spear-fishing, mostly for eels (the "murina" of the title). An old business colleague of her father's is about to visit, and her father plans to scam the visitor by trying to sell him a cursed island for a housing development.
Gracija Filipovic is arresting as Julija, and not merely because she spends most of the movie in a form-fitting one-piece diving suit. As the conscience of the film, she is bored, restless and, at times, disruptive. She envies the young people vacationing with abandon along the coast. The handsome visitor, Javier (Cliff Curtis), is her mom's former lover, and Julija's dad, Ante (Leon Lucev), will take his marital bragging rights to the grave. The mom, Nela (Danica Curcic), is a sad former model who just doesn't have it in her to escape the oppressive domestic situation that she and her daughter are trapped in (the daughter is literally confined leading up to the climax).
Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic, who co-wrote the screenplay, debuts as a director, and her camera is sometimes as restless as Julija is, although she knows how to pause and linger over the beauty of the Dalmatian coast (especially in the elegant lingering final zoom-out shot). And she refuses to fall into traps of convention. She presents Julija as a petulant child, intent on using Javier as a vehicle for escape.
While Julija is shapely and knowing, her story arc does not go where you might expect. This is not a cheesy '80s sex romp, in any sense of the word. It is smart and willing to take a few risks with the plot. The script, co-written by fellow newcomer Frank Graziano, could have been a little tighter, with more meat on its bones; but there's no denying that Kusijanovic and her star Filipovic are a compelling team.
A LOVE SONG (A-minus) - There's something about a spare love song that can make you ache yet comfort you at the same time. There are movies like that, too. "A Love Song" plays out like the plot device it leans on the most: a random mournful song, snaking across the desert through the static of a portable radio, barely there at times.
Leather-faced Dale Dickey ("Winter's Bone") plays Faye, years into mourning her partner, living in a cramped trailer on a campground somewhere in Colorado, where she has a view of a lake (where she fishes crawdads) and a snow-capped mountain. She resembles a zombie as she sleepwalks through her days. She has exactly two books -- one blue, one red; one's about birds and one's about the stars; one for day, one for night. She awakens by greeting whichever bird is calling out that morning. The movie's opening camera shots alight on hardy weeds and flowers surviving in dry, cracked soil, and that's a pretty obvious metaphor for Faye's survival skills despite the emotional desolation of her life.
She is waiting on a visitor, not sure if he'll show up in the middle of nowhere. But we know (from the previews, at least) that he will, right at the one-third mark. It's an old high school friend, Lito, played by Wes Studi, pretty craggy himself these days. Will the chiseled Lito -- also a widower (and similarly broken) -- make a connection with rough-hewn Faye? As they say these days, it's complicated.
This is the assured feature debut of writer-director Max Walker-Silverman. He is confident in Dickey's ability to draw in the viewer while doing virtually nothing. Sure, there is plenty of parched pathos, but he also tosses in a few side stories that offer droll comic relief. There is a friendly mailman; a nearby lesbian couple that invite her to dinner; and a bizarre family, four men and a girl straight out of a Coen brothers lark, who politely request that Faye move her trailer so's they can dig up their father and relocate his body to a new resting place that doesn't have an oil derrick spoiling his eternal vista.
Faye likes to play roulette with the dial on her portable radio, and she always lands on a dusty old tune that imparts just the perfect message. It's a touch of magical realism, with an absurd echo to the castaways on "Gilligan's Island." Having loved and lost, she tells Lito, made her understand what all those songs were about. Movies are like that, too. Sometimes they randomly amble into your life and tug at your heart.
BONUS TRACKS
Dickey and Studi have a crude lo-fi duet to Greenwich Village folkie Michael Hurley's "Be Kind to Me":
Over the closing credits, "Slip Slide on By" by Valerie June:
Our unrelated title track, from Jimmy Cliff:
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