Loving Glances

Dedicated to Rene Clair, Srdan Karanovic's comedy finds melancholy and robust humor in the aftermath of the civil war and genocide in the shattered Adriatic states. One needn't be a refugee to be lonesome, but it helps, as Labud could attest. In Belgrade with nothing but a plastic bag of personal belongings, the young man hides his unpopular Serbian heritage (the reason he can't get a visa to seek his beloved fiancee, long-fled to Chicago) and signs with Happy Milennium, a haphazard matchmaking service. Eventually Labud decides to pursue a romance with an upwardly-mobile Albanian named Romana, even though she seems quite beyond his reach. Our hero is lonely, but not alone; ever present in Labud's eyes and ears are an invisible, quarrelsome host of dead or lost friends and relatives, still fighting yesterday's battles, still determined to meddle in his affairs…and in Romana's as well. For it turns out that she has her ghosts, too. (In Serbian with English subtitles)