When the Phone Rang

A truly honest, if not especially professional way of responding to a film and beginning a review, is to say “I don’t know.” Or even less flattering to oneself, “I didn’t understand it”, but considering When the Phone Rang, the third feature from artist and filmmaker Iva Radivojević (and the first to show at Locarno, in the “Cineasti del presente” competition), the director herself is nursing the miscomprehension of the traumatic events her film depicts, even though her use of film language in communicating this is utterly deliberate and sure.

As a viewer, grasping both the shape of individual details and their role in the larger context was a challenge, albeit a rewarding one; although the film strives for clarity and not opacity, it also feels like it is trying to evoke its young female protagonist’s condition of “not knowing”. Namely that of being 11 years old, struggling to grasp the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, beginning in 1991 and partly triggered by the fall of communism, and feeling the signifiers of one’s personal life and family unity upended in the process.

For Radivojević and her on-screen surrogate Lana (the impressive Natalija Ilinčić), the eponymous phone call shatters her world and sense of security, symbolising the instant where the very substance of her life would be erased with the onset of war, but the dislocating aspect is how its actual content doesn’t naturally connect to this moment, however upsetting. A tight close-up of a clock displays the time as 10:36, with the third person voice-over by Slavica Bajceta establishing a rough time period of spring in 1992; the caller reveals that Lana’s maternal grandfather has died of a heart attack. It is, somehow, “the call that started the war”, and Radivojević conveys the family hastily crossing the border soon after. Yet more suggestive is the scrambling, as opposed to the harmony, of the personal and political; in Lana’s febrile, maturing mind, these unrelated events somehow reinforce one another, layering into an all-encompassing void. A more rational explanation is that her father’s death made her mother feel like she could suddenly abandon Yugoslavia – tellingly known in the narration as “X” – without also leaving him behind.

Given this event could be an “inciting incident” – to use a banal term from Hollywood screenwriting lore – with descriptions of exile and resettlement a natural next narrative step, what is also uncanny is that we return to the family’s hometown of Novi Sad, now Serbia’s second largest city after Belgrade, to overhear 10 more phone calls in total. This rigorous and modular structure provides grounding to the free-floating spots of memory, creating that pleasurably itchy motif of repetition so beloved by filmmakers steeped in high modernism and the more conceptual corners of the art world.

The succeeding phone calls speak of more quotidian things: interactions with Lana’s various friends and their fleeting desire to connect in-person; an older punk kid called Vlada (Vasilije Zečević), whose diffidence, attitude and drug taking (with aerosols prophetically leading to opium) oddly enrapture her; and flickers of her father’s possible connection to organised crime, as well as an embarrassing anecdote where she accidentally returns his secret collection of porn VHS cassettes to a local video shop. It’s not a self-indulgent flurry of memories, potentially only of relevance to the story teller themself, although the preponderance of narratives like these in the past decade of festival films can perhaps create a wariness in the viewer. The angularity and succinctness of the narration though, together with the distilled, square ratio compositions, create a valuable torsion and discomfort, assisted conversely by how some reminiscences are relayed in great, uncomfortable detail (which could have us saying “TMI” in our modern slang) or whether it’s one of her friends lip-syncing along to a Serbian language song, played almost in full, whose vocal melody strangely recalls ABBA.

Away from these expository scenes, the film’s latter half finds increasingly dynamic visual correlatives for a mind contemplating exile, followed by the enforcement of that departure. A dream sequence sees Lana’s head and shoulders bathed in single colour filters which rapidly overlap, creating a hypnotic “flicker” effect famous from 1960s avant-garde shorts. Then the rhythm finally reaches a diminuendo and Radivojević starts employing durational methods, first with a travelling tracking shot affixed to a vehicle ranging through a stark valley, transitioning to a rippling, lusciously blue body of water seen from a static camera position. From reading Radivojević’s artist biography, could this represent her next long-term home of Cyprus?

Film critics should be more willing to shed an illusion of authority. Writing in Another Gaze, Jonathan Rosenbaum took an idiosyncratic journey through Kira Muratova’s work with this in mind, accepting his gaps of expertise towards the topic at hand, and making his remoteness from her unique Ukrainian and Soviet context the confessional fulcrum of the piece. At Cineuropa, my primary publication, films from former Yugoslavian territories are typically reviewed by journalists from that region, who've had first-hand experience of its complexities. I am a reviewer engaging with this work, a film unflinching in its desire to speak authentically and in rarefied detail, and this piece is a flawed document of such, merging with its own amorphous sense of memory and chronology. I’m just another patient listener at the end of the phone.