If there could be an antidote to the sexual initiation comedies that Hollywood manufactures every time a new "cupcake" (male or female) is in fashion and the "creators" feel compelled to tell a story of a first sexual relationship so that they can show them naked to the public, «My Morning Laughter» is the perfect candidate for that privilege.
Hollywood usually removes social, ideological, or economic complications. The question is to undress the actress and the actor (who are invariably very cute) and thus give teenagers a lightning course of "heteronormative sex for good living", but what they seem to achieve is nurturing the planet with more neurotic people.
However... watching «My Morning Laughter» there were times when I did not know how to react. Some scenes seemed uncomfortably funny to me (such as the visit to the "psychic"), because you feel that "you shouldn't laugh at that"; others, painful (those that have to do with the protagonist's relationship with his father), and some, surprising, like the peak sex scene, which is clumsy, but at the same time of a certain tenderness, mixed with instructions from some manual, that it thrills...
Dejan, the protagonist (excellent Filip Djuric) is 30 years old and a virgin. Graduated from History (a career that incites complex geopolitical thoughts...), he is a substitute teacher in a school, his sad mother Radica (Djuricic), who denies all and lives apart from him, sub-maintains and controls him at her whim; and he lives with his old father (Klavkovic) in such a tough relationship that one does not know if they are really father and son.
The visit to the psychic-counselor-psychologist-astrologer Milos (Glogovac) is a key turning point in the film and occurs in the first minutes: Milos sings it clearly to both Milos and Radica, and prescribe them sex in a natural, funny, but firm way, which reminded me of a psychiatrist from San Antonio de Los Baños who tried to solve the lives of all of us, workers, teachers and students of the Cuban film school, distributing Viagra.
The rest of the film deals with the consequences of that visit and the decisions that Dejan makes --especially when he is with his friend and colleague Kaca (Vukovic), who unsettles, excites, and challenges him. These elements conform an unparalleled work that, at the end, made me say: what a tender film!
«My Morning Laughter» talks about a generation of Serbs, who, as director Marko Djordjevic says, lived overprotected by their parents so that they would not see the terrible reality that was outside the home. They were non-emancipated children living under the same roof with dad and mom, even if the relationships were dependent, tense, and destructive. This magnificent, charming, difficult film is about that and more, with aesthetic decisions that help deconstruct the viewer's false pity, the false compassion, and force us to look at the character and his environment, with frames that seem "wrong", light years away from the Hollywood-Disney-Netflix movie recipe, like a hidden camera, looking at everything, capturing everything, without disguising it. Highly recommended.
