QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN
David (Barry Ward) is a doting father seeking to connect with his prepubescent son Theo (Antonin Chmela) and adolescent daughter Klara (Dexter Franc) while holidaying on a gorgeous rocky beach on the Adriatic. The bonding, however, is neither instant nor magical. A number of barriers stand on the way of the well-meaning father. Firstly, he has recently separated from the mother. Secondly, both children are fiery and introspective, making the prospect of spontaneous fun a distant and elusive one. That’s particularly true in the case of the inscrutable Klara, who suffers from an eating disorder. Thirdly, father and children are of a different nationality.
Despite her father’s constant pleas, Klara refuses to eat more than the odd salad leaf. Her scrawny figure confirms that this s a long-term condition, and not just a h0liday caprice. This quickly changes after she becomes infatuated with the sexy and big-mouthed local Denis (Timon Šturbej). She quickly devours her dinner. He seems genuinely in love with the frail young woman, perhaps because – despite his extroverted facade – he too feels vulnerable inside: he was born out of wedlock, his mother passed away and he has a stormy relationship with his hesitant father.
Fate suddenly throws a spanner into the proceedings, and Klara’s hopes of love. One sunny day, someone kills Denis’s dad, and he becomes the prime murder suspect.
David is left to grapple with a stubborn, physically and mentally ill daughter desperately in love with a murder suspect, a selfish son with little interest in his sister’s wellbeing, and an angry ex (Barbora Bobulova) always ready to point fingers at the father of her children. The inevitable return home is tantamount to a death sentence for Klara. She resorts to radical measures in order to reclaim her independence. Every relation in the already broken family of four is about to collapse.
In the world of writer and director Olmo Omerzu, language and nationality are just as complex as interpersonal relations. David is English, while the other characters are Eastern European. He and the children alternate between language of Shakespeare and a Slavonic tongue that isn’t revealed until much later in the story. And the locals communicate in yet another language. Medium and long shots prevail as the director keeps viewers at a safe Brechtian distance from his characters, thus highlighting the sense of alienation. Everyone is a foreigner inside their own family. Klara is convinced that her parents hate and want to see her dead.
Nudity also serves to emphasise the sense of otherliness and solitude. Before she meets Denis, Klara insists that the family sunbathe in the nudist area. David grudgingly agrees to her request, in exchange for her eating her dinner (a promise she fails to honour later). Instead of wearing her birthday suit, Klara covers her entire body with pebbles, while a shy David covers his modesty with a towel (just like any good ol’ English gentleman would). The idea of being naked in front of your own offspring is not conducive to intimacy but to profound embarrassment instead. Later in the story, both parents are forced to engage in a very graphic sexual conversation with Klara, in one of the story’s most significant – and certainly the most hilarious – scenes.
The 40-year-old Slovenian director uses yet another device in order to play up the sense of distant and isolation between his characters. He refuses the disclose the exact location of the family holiday or even the country where the family are from until the last five minutes of this 110-minute film. Those unable to distinguish between Slavonic languages might be left wondering why Klara and Denis speak English instead of their native languages. Perhaps the knowledge that the beach is in Croatia, and the family are Czech is entirely redundant to the story. This is a universal piece of filmmaking about the impossibilities of love and the failures of communication, whatever the language and the nationality. It is also a concise study of emotional isolation, with some sparse yet effective elements of comic relief. A profound, engaging and entertaining movie.
Ungrateful Beings is in the Official Competition of the 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival.
