Croatia
3.5*
Director:
Vinko Brešan
Screenwriter:
Mate Matišić
Director of Photography:
Mirko Pivčević
Running time: 93 minutes
Original title: Svećenikova djeca
The Priest’s Children (Svećenikova djeca) is a visual feast and a subversive narrative treat full of humor that never outstays its welcome. Directed by acclaimed Croatian filmmaker Vinko Brešan and having a subversive priest at its core, the film ploughs the fraught but fertile soil of Bosnian-Croatian relations, including its religious component, but also opens with a rolling sequence of fourth-wall breaking that demonstrates Brešan’s playfulness not only with his subject matter but also with the art of filmmaking itself. This is an unexpectedly light-hearted romp, considering the intensity and sophistication of Witnesses (Svjedoci), Brešan’s 2003 film that dealt directly with the civil war in Yugoslavia.
Brešan’s film opens with an overhead shot of a baby crying in its crib. The overhead shot, sometimes called God’s point of view, is particularly apt as the action will rely on religion for both its logic and its comedy. The Priest’s Children is one long confession — a flashback to the misdeeds of Father Florijan (Krešimir Mikić), who is also our narrator, on a tiny island in the Adriatic Sea where he has been sent to eventually replace the aging Father Jakov. The misdeeds are multiple but mostly the same: Being frustrated at Father Jakov’s lack of initiative to keep the population from dying out, Florijan begins a campaign of mass fertilization — by ensuring all the condoms sold at the tiny kiosk on the jetty and at the pharmacy are defective.
He is helped in this by the god-fearing purveyors of the little rubbers who, each for his own slightly different reasons, would prefer it if the condoms didn’t stand in the way of population growth. However, actions have reactions, and before long foreign tourists are filling their beaches in the hope they will become fertile.
Defective condoms are no laughing matter — not only because people sometimes don’t have the means to feed an extra mouth, but also because of venereal diseases — but the director maintains the humour while never dismissing these issues out of hand, as AIDS is mentioned but since the island is so small and isolated we get the sense this is an impregnable bubble separate from the rest of civilisation.
Florijan, whose profession means he is sworn to secrecy, uses his intimate knowledge of the townspeople (who, given the size of the town, know almost all of each other’s secrets anyway) and their activities to promote, in his view, God’s preferred outcome. But while God may have some plans in this regard, Florijan and the others on the island involved in this scheme of reproduction are simply not up to the task, which leads to some hilarious scenes of ineptitude along the way.
At the start, Florijan’s confession (the flashback) is presented very creatively, as he looks into the camera to tell us directly what he is/was up to. A few minutes later, there is a very surprising, Charlie Kaufman–esque moment when the young Father Šimun (Filip Križan), whom he confesses to in the present, pops up in the flashback to ask a question, momentarily conflating the past and the present. Unfortunately, Brešan doesn’t find a way to keep up this sense of dynamism and spends the rest of the film entirely in the past, telling a straightforward story of farce set to a recognizably Balkan soundtrack, except for some quaint snippets that visually represent people’s gossip, set in an anonymous location bathed in white light with no sound besides some heavy breathing and the unmistakable thuds of flesh pounding flesh.
The deliberately controversial, tongue-in-cheek title of the film very accurately suggests the tone of the production, and few will be left disappointed by the execution of this tough balancing act that takes on the Roman Catholic Church’s position on contraception and even manages to address the issue of paedophilia in a serious way, having already laid the groundwork through comedy earlier on.
The Priest’s Children has a central character with good intentions, whose frustration with the small island town leads him to some very questionable actions, as he effectively plays God with people’s personal lives. However, we come to like him because he is naïve and never succumbs to the temptation of having even greater power over his congregation. As long as we don’t ponder the consequences of his reckless behaviour too much, this is a very gratifying and highly entertaining motion picture.
This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.