A WONDERFUL NIGHT IN SPLIT (2004) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Arsen Anton Ostojic
Coolio, Marija Skaricic, Dino Dvornik,
Mladen Vulic, Vicko Bilandzic, Nives Ivankovic
As the clock ticks down on New Year's Eve, a sailor on shore leave and a teenaged junkie share a moment of despair. A drug dealer pays the price for a deal gone bad. And two young lovers look for a place to hook up before the stroke of midnight. Three loosely connected stories, all set in the same two-hour time frame in the Croatian port city of Split, strikingly shot in shadowy, blue-tinted black and white. The irony of the title is inescapable. What happens to these characters is anything but wonderful. But there's an underlying fatalism at work that makes the stories morbidly compelling. It's like watching a slow-motion train wreck: You're not sure you ought to, and you're not sure you want to, but you still can't quite look away.
