You Have the Night

(Ti imaš noc, Ivan Salatic, Serbia/Qatar, 2018)

Young adult Sanja (Jasna Djuricic) loses her job aboard a ship, drifts through Italy, and returns home to Montenegro in Serbia. But her family members are now scattered (as in Jia Zhangke’s underrated Mountains May Depart [2015]), and this dislocation mirrors a more widespread social malaise: now that the local shipyard has closed, everyone wanders about, improvising means of survival, or simply giving up.

In You Have the Night, most of the major plot information is withheld, and crucial events are skipped out between scenes. As we follow these meandering characters spanning four separate generations, we must figure out for ourselves their now frayed and ambiguous lines of love, kinship and parental responsibility.

The intently focused shots of hands picking fruit or exchanging cash, the lack of a musical score, and the static bodies framed by bare doorways: all of this acknowledges Salatić’s clear debt to Robert Bresson’s L’argent (1983).

But You Have the Night is also a pared-down, de-dramatised version of Luchino Visconti’s epic chronicles such as La terra trema (1948) or Rocco and His Brothers (1960), in which industrial society tears apart the traditional fabric of family life.

The film’s title, recalling many pop songs, is ironically romantic: nobody here has the night (in the sense of possessing it, belonging to it) … or anything much else, for that matter.

It is a powerful, impressive feature debut for Ivan Salatić.

© Adrian Martin September 2018