There are several valid reasons why the new film by director Rajko Grlić Constitution of the Republic of Croatia deserves to be everyone's mandatory cinema reading this fall. First of all, this work, the screenplay of which is jointly signed by Grlić himself and the writer and journalist Ante Tomić (the same tandem previously did Watchtower 2006, as well as Let it stay between us 2010), but also with its provocatively-contradictory worded title irritates the on-call caregivers on both sides of the border that once united us, and today so deeply separates us. At the same time, as the key creative word here is still concept, Grlić's new creation and further solutions actively irritate national paranoiacs of all stripes, handing over the main role of a middle-aged history professor, a homosexual and a transvestite who was influenced by the Ustaše Vjekoslav Kralja, almost paradoxically and absolutely unacceptable in daily politics, to the Serbian actor Nebojša Glogovac.
But that is by no means the end of the author's daring shenanigans and diversions, as a result of which Grlić's current work imposes itself on the audience so dramatically and perfectly justifiably, because he a love story about hate (which is also the official subtitle of this production) from the very beginning, it conducts as a head-on collision of old and new, conservative and modern, politics and life, history and everyday life, principles and humanity, openly reckoning with homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny and tribal and religious mythomania. as the essential causes of all our Balkan conflicts. Finally, when the viewer, attracted by all those unusual and risky creative moves, surrenders to this camera film about the coexistence of an impossible quadrilateral of adults and seemingly irreconcilably different people, Constitution of the Republic of Croatia serves itself as a supreme genre experiment and surprise, with a painfully believable and experientially grounded balancing act between tragic drama and sentimental comedy, openly showing how - contrary to all expectations - in the very late author's age, Grlić is ready to sacrifice the pleasant comfort of the latter to the demands of the previously mentioned genre composition.
There are, of course, in this whole fine and carefully constructed altruistic weaving sometimes an empty narrative flow (the complete line with the police minister there) or superfluous digressions and exaggerations (the forced episode with the transformation of the current student of Professor Kralj), there are also some twists and turns whose conceptual and literary justification is not in dispute, while plausibility may be (which certainly culminates in a necessary but not entirely acceptable hepiend), but all these shortcomings simply pale in front of the honest, Aesopian parabolic nature of the story, which ultimately leads to the poetic reconciliation of the parties in the centuries-old religious, national, state-building and mental conflict. Someone will certainly notice ironically how such hippie idealism fits nicely with the well-known, painful stylistic washing of Grlić's entire oeuvre and the stumbling worldviews of the generation to which he belongs, but the causticness and civilizational counter-productiveness of the remarks in question will melt away in a moment before the sheerness of the subtle and invigorating ideological feat that Constitution of the Republic of Croatia undoubtedly represents.
Having made it there together with his colleagues, comrades-in-arms and friends from the past Prague schools of Yugoslav/ex-Yugoslav film on the threshold of the eighth decade of life and right before the door of a well-deserved creative retirement, Grlić actually Constitution of the Republic of Croatia quite successfully stands in defense of everything that they, as cinematographers, believed in and for which they stood so persistently creatively. The disintegration of the country in which they grew up and gained affirmation, the radical change of social climates, systems and - above all - the complete cinematographic organization, unequivocally and irrevocably marginalized the professional careers of that entire generation of distinguished authors, forcing them to wander, wander, take a forced break or to they turned to some other forms of artistic expression when they had yet to give their best.
However, unlike Karanović, Marković, Paskaljević or Zafranović, as well as the slightly younger and politically twisted Kusturica, whose authorial highlights remained forever imprisoned in the unjustifiably despised spiritual heritage of the SFRY, Grlić - after experiencing total creative ostracism himself - magically has found ways to reassert itself in the last ten years as a very important factor in the Croatian and regional cinema scene. If it is Constitution of the Republic of Croatia his last hurray, then the uncompromising engagement and poetic nobility of this daring film are the right guide for eventual and probably utopian unattainable directorial feats with which each member of this generation should say goodbye to the magical world of moving images to which they have dedicated their entire lives.
