SLOVENIA FOKUS (pt2) ‘Boys Like Sexy Legs, Girls Like Ice Cream’ and ‘Tuning’

Published on: January 2nd, 2006

  

 

 

 

Slovenia Fokus looks at some current and recent features from this country, and will be published here in an occasional series of pages with two films to each page. Part one covered Labour Equals Freedom and Bullet Avoids the Fool. Future sections will include Vinko Moderndorfer's Suburbs and Janez Burger's The Ruins, among others More information on many of these titles can be found at the Slovenian Film Fund.

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Matej Ocepek's Boys Like Sexy Legs, Girls Like Ice Cream [6/10]
   A cumbersome title, but it does fit the engagingly offbeat, semi-naive tone of this audaciously avant-garde mid-length debut feature. Slovenian experimental musician/filmmaker Ocepek hails from the same smallish town (Trbovjle) as world-renowned art-rock terrorists Laibach, but his undulating soundtrack here – impressively played 'live' on piano – is decidedly different from their assail-the-ears style.
   Ocepek's piano score accompanies distorted visuals which, we gradually realise, are shot on the promenade of some unspecified seaside resort: Slovenia? Croatia? Further afield? It's hard to be sure – the red-orange part of the colour spectrum is cranked up to the maximum, the picture is fuzzy and played at different speeds, and this gives an air of universality to proceedings.
   Gnomic, often child-like phrases appear on screen in neat white script. The effect is at first alienating and disorientating, but audiences willing to 'go with the flow' may find unexpected rewards – there's something hypnotic about this fusion of sound and image that feels like that much-abused term 'pure cinema': Ocepek owes as much to the silent-movie era (Boys Like… is, until near the end, effectively a silent film with its own built-in piano accompaniment) as he does to, say, Jean-Luc Godard, whose recent experiments in modulated, blurry video (such as the second half of Eloge de l'Amour) Ocepek's work occasionally recalls.
   Late in the day something approaching a kind of 'plot' develops, as we find out the identity of the 'person' from whose (woozy) point of view the film is made – and this 'revelation' casts everything that's gone before into a slightly different light. Even from the 'clues' in the first half, however, it's clear that Ocepek is adopting the perspective of an excitable, younger individual (or rather individuals) for whom English isn't their first language, and for whom an evening at the seaside is an opportunity for shameless voyeurism.
   As the title implies, Boys Like Sexy Legs… is first and foremost a sensual, even sensuous experience: it's evidently a warm summer night, and the red/orange palette heightens the sense of rampant hormones and unchecked adolescent passions: at times the shots resemble those from a thermo-imager, with waves of heat rising up from these youthful bodies into the dark night air.
   While Boys Like Sexy Legs certainly won't be to all tastes, it deserves full marks for originality and audacity – and for the way Ocepek creates and sustains his particular vision over the course of a short feature-length film. Although it must be said that, trimmed down by, say, 20 minutes or so, Boys Like Sexy Legs might yet find more openings in the avant-garde-friendly film-festivals and galleries which will prove its natural home.

Neil Young
2nd January, 2006

BOYS LIKE SEXY LEGS, GIRLS LIKE ICE CREAM : [6/10] : Slovenia 2005 : Matej OCEPEK : 71 mins (timed) : seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), 1st January 2006 (with thanks to Matej Ocepek)

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Igor Sterk's Tuning [5/10]
   Barely an hour in duration – padded out to 68 minutes via conspicuously stately opening and closing credits – Tuning sadly fails to confirm the promise of Sterk's last picture, the niftily elliptical city-kaleidoscope that was Ljubljana. The absence of superb editor Dafne Jemersic – here replaced by veteran Petar Markovic – is perhaps crucial, and it's also notable that, after writing Ljubljana solo, Sterk has collaborated with Romania's Sinisa Dragin (writer-director of Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth) on the screenplay. The result is rather more dialogue than has previously been the case with Sterk's work (his widely acclaimed 1996 debut Express, Express was near-wordless) – and the change isn't for the better.
   The rather thin story is an over-familiar tale of mid-life crisis (Sterk is 37) and infidelity – it doesn't help that star Peter Musevski has played this kind of role so often in past: indeed, his presence is only one of several factors which makes Tuning unfortunately (and one presumes coincidentally) so similar to Damjan Kozole's current release Labour Equals Freedom.
   In that picture, Musevski's hangdog hero was an economic struggler: here, his character ('Peter') is rather better off, a successful, mildly obnoxious businessman whose work often takes him to Brussels – leaving behind his brittle, dissatisfied wife Katrina (Natasa Burger) at home in Ljubljana. Peter thinks nothing of visiting prostitutes while away from Slovenia, and even toys with the possibility of a closer-to-home infidelity when he bumps into an old flame at a school reunion. The neglected Katrina, meanwhile, is rapidly nearing the end of her tether…
   Tuning is competently acted, shot, edited – but there's nothing here to lift the picture in any way out of the ordinary. Or even, it must be said, to maintain viewer interest even over that running-time: Sterk and Dragin might well have been advised to trim even further and make Tuning into an extended short. If nothing else, this might have brought some focus and sharpness to what is otherwise an underwhelmingly so-whattish experience.

Neil Young
2nd January, 2006

TUNING : [5/10] : aka Uglasevanje : Slovenia 2005 : Igor STERK : 68 mins : seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), 31st December 2005
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Jigsaw Lounge reviews of other recent films from Slovenia:
2000       Not Sponsored (VHS) (Mitja Okorn)
2001       Blind Spot (Hanna A W Slak) 
               Bread and Milk (Jan Cvitkovic)
2002       Guardian of the Frontier (Maja Weiss)
               Headnoise (Andrej Kosak) 
               Ljubljana (Igor Sterk)
               Not Sponsored II (Mitja Okorn)
               Rustling Landscapes (Janez Lapajne)
2004       Here and There (Mitja Okorn)
2005       Divided States of America : Laibach 2004 Tour (Saso Podgorsek) 
               Gravehopping (Jan Cvitkovic)