‘Horsemen’: Sarajevo Review | Ratings
Director: Dominik Mencej. Slovenia/Serbia/Italy/Croatia/Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2022. 107 min.
A wonderful kind of painful tenderness pervades the Slovenian film road from 1999 Riders, the tenderly titled but quietly excellent feature debut from director and co-writer Dominik Mence. Adjectives such as “promising” and “affordable” do not quite fit: the picture that bowed in the main competition in Sarajevo seems very much like the arrival of a fully formed and important new European talent.
One of the most convincing and unsentimental evocations of loving friendship in recent times
Abundant further festival play is much deserved for this multinational co-production. And while a low-budget indie hailing from a relatively obscure corner of the former Yugoslavia — its cast bolstered by a quartet of youthful strangers — might seem like a tough sell theatrically, adventurous distributors should definitely take a close look at this lyrical gem.
The most effective nostalgia exercises are often two-fold: cherished classics like George Lucas American graffiti and Petar Bogdanović The last picture show are set in the relatively recent past and deal with young characters who themselves yearn for even earlier eras. Pretty Fast Company , but then again, these were second films for Lucas and Bogdanovich—Mence’s only previous big-screen credits are a pair of short films (most recently in 2014 Soperating time Sleep), which won domestic awards but had little impact elsewhere.
Mence’s riders of the same name are two twenty-three-year-old boys: gentle Tomaž (Timon Sturbej) and heated, punkish Anton nicknamed Tunc (Petja Labovič). Lifelong best friends find themselves disillusioned by the limited horizons of their remote village. Inspired by watching Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture landmark Easy Rider on a VHS tape – hilariously mislabeled as “Easy Riders” – the pair hit the road. Their somewhat rickety means of transportation are mopeds, which the auto mechanic Tomaz has adapted in such a way that they strangely resemble the Harley Davidsons on which Hopper and Peter Fonda famously roared along the wide open highways of the USA.
In the classic manner of a road movie, an episodic picaresque follows with a loose, mostly improvised itinerary. Cinematographer Janez Stucin’s widescreen visuals capture sparsely populated Slovenian and later Croatian landscapes with a grainy Super 16 look that’s more a matter of charming charm than postcard beauty.
The duo experience various adventures and hardships on their travels, as well as several encounters with the opposite sex. The most important of their fellow travelers is Peter (Nikola Kojo), an initially gruff cycling veteran, who provides something of a father figure to the two young men, whom they didn’t have before.
Easy Rider (surprisingly, not a single frame is seen here) for Mence and co-screenwriter Boris Grgurovič, it is only the most prominent among many cinematographic reference points. There is more than breath according to Monte Hellman Two-lane road also – James Taylor’s dark-haired, charismatic Labovic dead ringer – and echoes of Gus Van Sant My own private Idaho.
Perfectly embodied by Sturbej in what should be a stellar performance, Tomaž seems like the Central European cousin of River Phoenix’s narcoleptic Mikey. This fair-haired, vulnerablely innocent and fervently spiritual dreamer spends a significant amount of time asleep and/or experiencing religiously themed visions – the film opens confusingly in the middle of one such dramatic hallucination.
It develops in a boldly non-linear way, but you can always follow, Riders — whose opening credits last about 20 minutes — thanks to the consistently virtuoso work of editors Andrej Nagodet and Matic Drakulic, the viewer is immersed in Tomaž’s own mental space through impressionistic montages. Indeed, the flow of images, sounds and sequences is so captivating that these two cutters undoubtedly deserve just as much credit as Mencej and Grgurović (the very last shot concludes the action in a deeply satisfying way).
The fleeting cameo of the greatest Slovenian actor on the movie screens after independence, Petr Musevski, who died in March 2020, reveals that Riders was filmed some time ago (summer 2018, actually) and thus enjoyed a lengthy post-production, allegedly extended due to the pandemic. If so, the lock time was very well spent. Much more than the sum total of its big-screen predecessors, this emotionally resonant, multi-layered picture is an amiably unassuming immersion in a bygone era—a richly textured backdrop for one of the most compelling and unsentimental evocations of loving friendship in recent memory.
Production companies: Staragara, Antitalent, Sense Production, Transmedia, Novi Film, RTV Slovenia
International Sales: Staragara, [email protected]
Producers: Jožko Rutar, Srđan Šarenac, Igor Prinčič, Milan Stojanović, Miha Černec, Danijel Pek
Screenplay: Dominik Mencej, Boris Grgurovič
Cinematographer: Janez Stucin
Scenography: Iva Rodic
Editing: Andrej Nagode, Matic Drakulic
Music: Luca Ciut
Cast: Timon Šturbej, Petja Labovič, Elma Juković, Nikola Kojo, Anja Novak