It takes a while on “a beautiful evening, a beautiful day” to reach Baren Island, a notorious penal colony in the former Yugoslavia, where no cells were needed and armed guards counted on the sea to keep the prisoners in line. However, a prison without bars reveals itself early in writer-director Ivona Jukka’s stark and sometimes excessive black-and-white drama. The film takes place in 1957, after the country escaped the threat of Nazi fascism, falling into the clutches of the communist Josip Broz Tito, who was no less shy about ostracizing dissenting voices, including those of the gay community.
Where Tito maintained his grip on the public imagination through propaganda, Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day unapologetically presents a darker portrait of his leadership by following a pair of romantically entwined directors Lovro (Dado Kosic) and Nenad (Djordje Galic). With a supporter at the highest levels of government serving in the military, the two spend their days on set without interference and can be seen holding hands at Lovro’s parents’ dinner table without a care in the world. However, Lovro appears to have opened the door to trouble by attempting to film a scene in his latest film that hints at a border guard and a Yugoslav People’s Army soldier escaping together into Italy, drawing the attention of an observer from the set. Oversight board.
That Juca disregarded such oversight was evident only a few seconds later when he opened “Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day” with a graphic sex scene between Lovro and Nenad that would certainly not be accepted even by a current panel. (In fact, after being selected as Croatia’s official Oscar nominee, the director claimed that financial support for the awards campaign has been much lower than in other countries in recent years.) However, the story relies on a person of authority upon the introduction of The Prince (Amir Hadzihafzebegovic), a mid-level bureaucrat appointed by the state to oversee Lovro’s next film and unofficially requested to sabotage the production from within. The poker-faced Hadzihavizbegović imbues the prince with a palpable credibility that makes it possible to believe that he is as willing to be as suspicious of those who operate above him as they are below him.
Jukka ably creates a society where no one can trust each other, and the government is keen to drive the wedge even further by turning anyone into an informant. But there’s an unfortunate tendency to put the demands of the story before the characters, which leads to rash decisions on their part that don’t quite follow through. The director also runs the risk of arguing so tenaciously against bigotry that sensitivity to marginalized people is overlooked. When the situation turns violent for Lovro, Nenad, and their friends and colleagues Stefan (Slaven Doslo) and Ivan (Elmir Krivalić), it becomes infuriating for reasons other than intended. One brutal scene, the beating of a gay man who has just shown extreme kindness, makes it appear as if it is his morality – not his sexuality – that makes the cruelty so horrific. The film also abandons a remarkable effort to normalize the physical act of sex between two men on screen; There isn’t much visual differentiation in how the rape is presented during the Barren Island sequences.
Although Juka never explicitly makes this suggestion, there is a sense that Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day is the kind of film that Lovro and his band of bohemians might have made if left to their own devices, for better or worse. The film isn’t as rebellious against narrative conventions as it is in other respects, which makes moments where emotion can obscure coherence, both in its rage and also in its daydreams, and where scenes of dancing and joy can also seem gratuitous, seem annoying. Out of sync. But when the dominant narrative of one era is set by someone else, Jukka realizes how powerful that unfiltered perspective can be. Still living with the history that Tito built after flooding the airwaves internationally and crowding out the view of anyone who dares to dissent, the scene of someone grabbing a movie camera to capture a day on the coast when Lovo and Nenad go skinny diving becomes one of the most interesting scenes. Most touching scenes in the movie. It confirms the existence of those who were largely erased to this day, even if they were the only ones who knew the footage existed. One can be happy that Jukka picked up her camera too.