52 Films by Women Vol 6. 37. MURINA (Director: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović)
If you contrast a film’s opening and closing images, you can
sometimes summarise what has happened in the drama. At the beginning of Murina,
the debut feature of Croatian co-writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, the camera is under the water
looking up. We see black ripples spreading from right to left before a man and
a woman, both bearing spearguns swim into frame. The man is leading but the
young woman next to him is close to his side. Even before we see them, we
experience the water audibly, specifically the sound that accompanies air
bubbles rising to the surface. Convention depicts this as a heavy noise, the
reverse of a rockslide. It is as if we can feel the weight of the water on the
swimmers’ bodies. In the closing image, filmed from above the water – the
camera looks down from the sky – a lone woman swims by herself, not hunting but
heading in a straight line. She cuts a confident, powerful figure – we have
been told that she has shoulders like a man. We worry about her swimming so far
out to sea (spoiler alert: the camera is some distance away from the character
so Kusijanović can employ a
swimming double without detection). However, we feel she’ll reach a
destination.
Not every director is precise in their use of imagery, but
Kusijanović is an instinctive
filmmaker whose work has caught the attention of director Martin Scorsese, who
is listed as an executive producer. Scorsese with his production partner Emma
Tillinger Koskoff has supported many female directors in the last few years
including Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro), Danielle Lessovitz
(Port Authority) and Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir and The
Souvenir: Part II). In some ways, Murina exhibits
Scorsese’s fascination with tortured masculinity – Ante (Leon Lučev), the protagonist’s repressive father
has a fragile sense of authority. However, it is unquestionably the work of
Kusijanović, who won the
Camera D’Or for best debut film at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Murina is not directly autobiographical, but
Kusijanović based the story
on her experiences growing up in Dubrovnik. She insists that Ante is ‘not a
caricature’ and ‘is more nuanced’ than many of the men she has observed. Ante,
we discover, is desperate to leave the coast and settle in Zagreb, Croatia’s
capital city. To this aim, he is hosting his old employer, Javier (Cliff
Curtis), a millionaire described in a magazine as a ‘ruthless icon’. In his
younger days, Ante captained Javier’s boat, then crashed it, resulting in a
fallout between the two men. The ending of their relationship crushed Ante; now
he is excessively welcoming, describing Javier as ‘God on Earth’. Ante hopes
that Javier will buy his land and asks his wife, Nela (Danica Ćurčić) to order the Plavac (Croatian red
wine) that his visitor likes. Unbeknownst to Ante, Javier is visiting
for a different reason.
The dialogue alternates between Croatian and English, the
latter for scenes with Javier. Kusijanović took the unusual step of having her four lead actors live
together for thirty-days (in her grandmother’s house) to get to know each
other. This was mostly for the benefit of lead actress Gracija Filipović, the non-professional star of
Kusijanović’s previous short, Into the Blue. Kusijanović was
desperate to reunite with Filipović, who acted for her then aged thirteen in a
drama about a young girl fleeing an abusive relationship. Kusijanović wanted to
capture Filipović at the age of sixteen before she became a young woman. She
achieved this – Murina was shot in 2019, pre-Covid – having
written the film for her. There is a lot of Kusijanović in the protagonist Julija
and the film articulates her desire to leave the country of her birth;
Kusijanović resides with her husband and baby son in New York. The overriding
theme is resilience.
Murina is tightly structured, set over the few
days of Javier’s visit. The spectre of a recent disaster hangs over the drama –
there was a fire on a boat. At her darkest, Julija wishes her father had died
in the tragedy. In the opening, Julija and her father tussle in the act of
spearing a murina or moray eel. Her father describes Julija is enjoying the
hunt; in fact, she enjoys diving – the killing of eels does not appeal. The
source of the struggle isn’t clear, but Julija’s swimsuit is torn. We see her
change from a white swimsuit to a blue one, illustrating her transition into
someone more independent.
‘I’ve never been
in love,’ Julija tells Javier. We believe her. Her father keeps her well away
from local boys, ordering her to clean chairs or otherwise remain busy. To her
father, Julija isn’t a person but an achievement, to recite poetry in front of
Javier and his guests and then to disappear. Ante ensures that Julija doesn’t
spend much time looking at holidaymakers, ordering her to raise the rope that
prevents yachts from docking at the family’s part of the beach. ‘You can tie
your boat on my balls,’ Ante shouts at a group of vacationing youths, whose
leisure Julija admires, though not the boorish behaviour of one young man on
the boat, who spills suntan lotion on a girl while she is asleep sunbathing,
then unties her bikini strap. She yelps as he turns her over and straddles her.
Javier arrives
with an entourage in tow, presenting Julija with a gift. He speaks of Ante
admiringly and indulges him even when he humiliates Julija by making her recite
the poem he wrote about the sea – she recites in Croatian, which Javier may not
understand. ‘You left out a part,’ Ante tells her in front of the group, adding
to Julija’s discomfort. Julija isn’t meek; her looks convey disdain. Kusijanović
gave her cast a script with a lot of dialogue and then removed lines before
filming so that the cast could convey unspoken thoughts.
The next day,
after Javier’s entourage departs, Ante humiliates his daughter to a greater
extent, when the family goes out on Ante’s boat. Julija complains that her
father is steering too close to a rock and pleads with him to change course.
Ante steers the boat without acknowledging the danger. They pass through
unscathed but then Ante throws his daughter into the water. He doesn’t like to
be criticised in front of Javier. Julija swims over to an island and is
otherwise unscathed. She isn’t disturbed by her father’s behaviour; in fact she
expects it. We see her walk barefoot on a stony hill; she’s tough. The sequence
ends with a picnic on the promontory, with Nela feeding each family member with
what looks like red roe egg on toast.
Javier and Nela
have history; when they were younger, Javier asked her to marry him. She
refused, for reasons that aren’t entirely spelt out. Perhaps Ante was indeed
the more impressive of the two men. Nela has learned to live with her husband.
She is cautiously optimistic that the move to Zagreb will make him calmer.
‘When he has money, he will be worse,’ retorts Julija. Observing her mother
with Javier, she encourages Nela to make her move. Javier clearly has marital
problems; Julija observes him having an angry phone conversation with his
estranged wife. Julija is also buoyed by Javier’s pronouncement that she could
go to Harvard; ‘they’ll snap her up’, he tells Ante. ‘What will she do when she
returns?’ asks Ante. ‘Who says I would return?’ snaps Julija. Later, Ante tells
her, ‘I could send you to a boarding school in the mountains.’ There is,
however, no comparison.
During the third
day of Javier’s visit, Ante convenes a meeting when they finally discuss the
land. Julija is asked to keep out of sight, though she appears as the meeting
draws to a close. Ante is once again perturbed. ‘He doesn’t want to buy the
land,’ Julija will tell her father. He is reluctant to listen. The quartet take
a boat out (with a guy who helps them into their suits) with Nela wanting to
dive. Julija effectively takes her place, swimming with Javier and surveying
the wreck of a modern boat on the ocean floor. We sense this is Javier’s boat,
the one Ante sunk all those years before.
The dive leaves
Nela angry. She refuses to talk to her daughter. Julija ends up diving off the
boat and hanging out with the vacationing youths. A young man approaches her.
Julija tells him that her father is a millionaire and is sending her to
Harvard. Javier appears, playing the role of Julija’s father. He offers his
watch to the first of them that can bring Julija to shore – by this time Julija
and her forward looking young admirer had gone swimming and started kissing.
Julija gets back before any of them. No one wins the watch.
Towards the end
of the film, after Julija has put on her mother’s red dress, Ante’s impatience
with his disobedient daughter overflows. He locks her away in a storage room.
Her mother brings Julija food and drink, but Julija won’t touch it. Finding a
sealed-up window, she calls out to Javier, who is walking with her parents to
join a procession to remember the dead, but he cannot hear her. She finds a
hatch that leads to water below. She then slips down it. She calls out to her
father to no avail. To escape, she must swim under the water. There, she spots
a moray eel.
The swimming
scenes – and Julija’s entrapment – are very tense. Anxiety is palpable. I won’t
reveal what happens, but Ante is left in no doubt about Julija’s feelings. There is an epilogue involving a hunt for
moray eels. A harpoon gun is pointed at Ante.
The murina (moray
eel) is a metaphor for the film’s hero. It has two sets of jaws, the first to
defend itself, the second to self-harm. Julija begs her mother to leave with
Javier. She begs Javier to take her with him. Neither option is possible.
The
father-daughter relationship is played out decisively; this is a film with no
turning back. It resonated with the audience. At the screening I attended, an
Asian man stood up to say that he too had a father whose disappointment in life
had made him cruel; Kusijanović’s film offered no answers. At the conclusion of
the question-and-answer session, Kusijanović sought out the man and gave him a
consoling hug. I could not imagine a male director doing this. ‘It happens at
every q and a,’ Kusijanović told me later. Her film is a tremendous
achievement. Her follow-up though won’t be set in Croatia, though, rather (if
the fates align) will be in English with the action taking place in Mexico and
involving a mother-daughter relationship.
Reviewed at
Ciné Lumiere, South Kensington, Central London, Saturday 9 April 2022, 18:00
screening attended by the director, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović
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