The White Fortress: Valentine to Sarajevo a Gripping Blend of Romance and Social Realism
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
The White Fortress, Bosnia’s Oscar submission for best international picture and directed by Bosnian-Canadian Igor Drljaca, is an unusual but moving blend of romance and social realism. The Bosnian Canadian co-production also qualified for the Toronto International Film Festival’s annual Canada’s Top 10 list.
Set in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the suburbs of the capitol city of Sarajevo, the script follows a thin, pale teenaged Faruk (Pavle Cemerikic), who lives with his invalid grandmother (Irena Mulamuhic) in a dilapidated Soviet-era high-rise block. Faruk works for his Uncle Mirsad (Jasmin Geljo), a man whose gruesome dreams suggest he is traumatized by the experience of the Bosnian war.
The rest of the time Faruk plays basketball with friends, shoplifts, and seduces girls, At night, he goes home to his grandmother, watching faded videotapes of his late mother, a concert pianist, or his favourite movie, the 1972 heroic drama, Walter Defends Sarajevo, in which Yugoslav partisans thwart the German army during the Second World War.
Grandma’s bills must be paid, and Faruk, like any teenager, likes new things. Under the influence of his friend Almir (Kerim Čutuna), Faruk begins venturing into petty crime, under the control of flashy sadistic mob boss, Cedo (Ermin Bravo).
Among other ventures, Cedo traffics teenaged girls to wealthy men and Faruk has a chance to make money working as a driver. He immediately gets into trouble when, instead of driving Minela (Farah Hadzic) — one of the girls — to her assignation, he shares a cab with her.
To atone for his errors, and for stealing some scrap metal, Faruk is informed he must recruit a new girl for Cedo. By chance, Faruk has recently met a potential prospect, Mona (Sumeja Dardagan) who he recently hit on at the local shopping centre and gave her his number.
Mona unexpectedly texts him and agrees to meet him at the mall. Her father, a wealthy politician, and her mother live separately under the same roof. Mona is in the way. They plan to ship Mona, currently attending an English-language private school, off to live with relatives in Toronto.
Despite his predatory instincts, Faruk finds himself falling for the girl, who is only in first year of high school. When he’s called on a second driving assignment to pick up a badly roughed up Minela, he can’t deny what selling Mona into that life might mean. Although moral traps are a staple of social realist films, the starkness of Faruk’s choice is chilling. We don’t typically explore the moral quandaries of men who pimp out women they love.
The film is both a love story and a lament for the city where the director grew up. Shot mostly during mornings and nights, winding through streets on motor scooters or work vans, the film draws a picture of pervasive urban decline. (Occasionally, Drljaca takes this to excess: The picture is plenty bleak enough without the overuse of bad dreams and symbolic stray dogs).
When Mona and Faruk manage to escape, it’s into sun-dappled fields or forests outside of town.
In the last act, they steal away to the antique ruin that gives the film its title, a national hilltop monument that dates back to Medieval times. As they sit at night on the White Fortress’ broken walls, the city below them glows, jewel-like in the dark. The film ends on a soft indecisive note, refusing narrative satisfaction in favour of something more like a sigh of regret.
The White Fortress. Directed and written by Igor Drljaca. Starring Pavle Cemerikic, Irena Mulamuhic, Sumeja Dardagan, Jasmin Geljo, and Kerim Cutuna. Now playing at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox (and on TIFF Digital March 25); Montreal and Vancouver on March 25 and select Landmark Theatres on March 28.