REVIEW
To See Is to Understand
Juraj Lerotić’s Safe Place (Sigurno mjesto, 2022)
VOL. 132 (FEBRUARY 2023) BY ANA GRGIĆ
Keeping your eyes open on yourself and on the world, on the front of the mirror and on
the back of the mirror in order to hold off the night.
– Paul Eluard (La Poésie du Passé, 1951)1
How do you represent the un-representable? The unimaginable? Do you turn off all the
lights and whisper, turning to darkness, in the hope to communicate what is
inconceivable? Ironically, Juraj Lerotić’s debut feature Safe Place is not a safe place at
all. Not for its protagonists, and not for its spectators. To enter Safe Place is to
confront yourself with a void. With the unexplainable. With the unspeakable. Yet no
matter how difficult it gets, you feel compelled to keep looking as Lerotić keeps the
camera rolling. He compels us to keep our eyes open, “on the front of the mirror and
on the back of the mirror”, like in Paul Eluard’s poem, “in order to hold off the night”.
Because, we are deeply aware, right from the beginning, that the night is coming. And
yet, we keep watching, and we hope for catharsis. After all, it is also a powerful film
about affectionate love, brotherhood, and humanity.
Safe Place had its Greek premiere at the 63rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival,
where it was shown as part of the Meet the Neighbors section with the director in
attendance for the full-house post-screening Q&A sessions. This feature-length debut
premiered earlier in 2022 at the Locarno International Film Festival Cineasti del
presente competition, where it garnered three awards, including the prize for best
debut feature. It continued to sweep awards and draw critical acclaim as it toured on
the film festival circuit, winning both The Heart of Sarajevo Award for best film and the
Best Actor award after its regional premiere at the Sarajevo International Film
Festival. While finishing the writing of this review, the film had just won a Special
Mention at the 2023 Trieste International Film Festival, and continues on a very
successful theatrical run in the director’s home country.
Announced by a poetic and foreboding opening quote – “If none of this had happened, I
East European Film Bulletin | 1
could have told you: Look, this is your building, count to twenty and I’ll come running
into the scene” –, the film sets the tone from the beginning, making spectators aware
that we are watching a film, that what we see is, indeed, fiction. And this is where it
gets tricky. Safe Place actually draws on and plays on the director’s own painful family
history, the suicide of his own brother. Over the course of a day, the film chronicles the
harrowing psychological journey of the family, following the brother’s attempted
suicide, in their search for a safe place. The film starts with Bruno, played by the
director Juraj Lerotić himself, running into the scene and heading towards a
featureless post-Socialist building, to breaking down a door and discovering that his
brother Damir, played by the talented Croatian actor Goran Marković (known
internationally for his performance in Dalibor Matanić’s critically acclaimed 2015 The
High Sun), has attempted suicide. From this point, the film slowly constructs and
unravels the family tragedy, from the capital Zagreb to their seaside hometown, Split,
as the brothers are joined by their mother (played by the convincing character actress,
Snježana Sinovičić Šiškov) who has learned of the events. The director’s choice to act
as his fictional self, may seem indulgent to some, and reminiscent of performances of
directors such as Woody Allen or even Nanni Moretti and their nervous and quirky
energy, yet Lerotić comes across as authentic and incredibly fragile. Perhaps this
choice of a performative iteration, in the fictional universe of a real past event, carries
cathartic weight as an act of repetition.
The film’s stylistic choices and narrative approach draw on recognizable
characteristics of “slow cinema” (prevalent at festivals and in independent cinema
since the 2000s), as well as New Romanian Cinema, as noted by several critics.
Broadly speaking, scenes in the representative films of the New Romanian Cinema
primarily function as tableaux. There is a predominance of lengthy medium shots with
no camera movement, and the dramaturgy tends to focus on everyday situations with
restrained dialogues. However, Lerotić’s somewhat unconventional formalistic
solutions, which vacillate between gloomy realism/slow-paced rhythm and more
dramatic events and acts such as frantic running, fittingly reflect the fragile
psychological state of the characters and the incoherence of thoughts. In my view, the
film also owes a great deal to the films of Nulgi Bilge Ceylan, in particular, the building
of a felt psychological meta-space and the very complex use of sound design, palpable
in Ceylan’s Three Monkeys and his Uzak. Safe Place recalls and draws on other artistic
traditions, too. It is impossible not to think of the extreme perspective in the famous
Renaissance painting, Andrea Mantegna’s Cristo morto (1485), and its subsequent
citation in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s powerful finale in Mamma Roma (1962), when Damir is
confined again to the hospital bed after he had attempted suicide for the second time
at the police station. Like Ettore in Mamma Roma, this image of Damir powerfully
evokes and presages the film’s ending.
The mise-en-scene powerfully conveys the disorientation of the family caught in an
impossible situation, between the cold bureaucratic machine of state hospitals and the
police, incompetent and absent psychologists and doctors, and their desperation to
save a loved brother and son. Together with experienced Slovenian cinematographer
Marko Brdar,2 who has numerous credits under his belt, Lerotić creates a compelling
East European Film Bulletin | 2
visual experience, through strong angles and compositions of interiors and exteriors
and a drab yet affect-full color palette and tones. Obstructions, doors, shadows and
reflections in bleak, mostly rundown hospital interiors, waiting rooms, and offices,
reflect the all too familiar cinematic look of the post-Socialist Eastern European
rundown spaces, but more importantly, these devices create a feeling of anxiety and
confine the characters to their inescapable fate. Some strong stylistic choices make A
Safe Place stand out, however, from the conventional post-Socialist Eastern European
aesthetics. For instance, the scene in which the two brothers have a conversation
about Damir’s death, at the beginning of the film, cleverly breaks our expectations of
the fictional element and classical film structure, through a small and yet perceptible
change in the mise-en-scene, Damir’s costume and an already lit cigarette which he
pulls out from his front shirt pocket. Or take the masterful use of sound, such as the
quasi-avantgarde poetic ending, launched by the mother’s piercing shrill at the news of
her son’s death. The film cuts to experimental images of frantic camera movements,
which appear out of control, in order to settle on a moment from the past, evoked
earlier in the film through a color photograph, which Bruno gives to the police when
they come searching for Damir after he had escaped from the hospital. It’s
summertime, boys are jumping into the sea from a concrete wall, while Damir turns
and looks towards us and the film’s author, his brother. We never see the sky, as the
framing and composition – be it in the monotonous interiors of the hospitals and police
stations, and non-descript apartments, or once on the sunny Adriatic coast – continue
to convey a strong sense of imprisonment and confinement, and the impossibility of
escape.
This is a film which cuts deeply into one of society’s taboos, the question of suicide and
mental health, and our incapacity to deal with their consequences. Safe Place is also a
subtle and poignant critique of the Croatian health care system, the police, and
systemic bureaucracy, recalling films such as The Death of Mr Lazarescu (dir. Cristi
Puiu, 2005),3 and furthermore, in terms of its theme, the more recent Romanian
documentary Collective (dir. Alexander Nanau, 2019), which exposed the country’s
catastrophic health care system. Through this film, Lerotić takes a hard look at the
inhumane and mechanistic bureaucracy of the Croatian health care system, and at its
failures.4 Recent protests following the death of an investigative journalist in Split, who
died after not being admitted to the hospital,5 continue to point to financial and
systemic difficulties of the current system, which is neither able to provide a safe
place, nor adequate care for its citizens. Despite the moodiness of the film’s tone, there
is also something of a local flavor about A Safe Place, such as allusions and lighthearted humor, exchanged between Bruno and the mother throughout the film: “When
I first tried Normabel, I thought they should give the Noble prize to the person who
invented it”. Or further in the scene when Damir ironically notes that his arm is cut up
just like Terminator’s, which adds a touch of light-heartedness and humanity in an
otherwise dire situation. Perhaps Lerotić’s film will not lead directly to significant
changes in Croatia’s healthcare system lacking political will, but nonetheless, the film
opens up a dialogue about neglected issues in Croatian society, notably mental health
and the need for psychologists.
East European Film Bulletin | 3
References
1. Eluard, Paul. Capital of Pain. English translation by Mary Ann Caws, Patricia
Terry and Nancy Kline. Black Widow Press, 2006.
2. Polona Petek has described the uniqueness of Marko Brdar’s cinematography as
``bruised-looking photography’’ in her discussion of the Slovenian film, Ivan (dir.
Janez Burger, 2017). Petek, Polona. ``12. Slovenia: A small national cinema in the
phase of transnational synergy’’. In: Contemporary Balkan Cinema. Edinburgh
University Press, 2020, 208-227; 211.
3. Marko Njegic, Slobodna Dalmacija,
https://slobodnadalmacija.hr/kultura/film-tv/sigurno-mjesto-bolna-hrvatska-dramabez-presedana-1235307 [Accessed on 8 March 2023] and Neil Young, Screen
Daily
https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/safe-place-sarajevo-review/5173408.article
[Accessed on 8 March 2023].
4. The death of investigative journalist Vladimir Matijanić in Split in August 2022
has prompted a series of protests across the country for better health care, and
has led to the Croatian Journalists Association demanding the resignation of
Health Minister Vili Beroš. See Vuk Tesija, Balkan Insight,
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/02/06/croatian-journalists-demand-investigation-in
to-colleagues-death/ [Accessed on 8 March 2023].
5. The daily newspaper Jutarnji List reports the need for health care reform, due to
a high number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, and difficulty in reaching the
hospital in an emergency. Goranka Jureško, Jutarnji List,
https://www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/slovenci-imaju-manje-lijecnika-i-manje-bol
nica-nego-hrvatska-ali-i-bitno-manju-smrtnost-gradana-15263411 [Accessed on 8
March 2023].
East European Film Bulletin | 4