Musikk for bryllup og begravelser

I saw this film at Rotterdam Film Festival, mostly out of curiosity to see my countryman, musician Goran Bregovic (Bogdan) act. The story is interesting, but what I didn't like is lots of clichés in describing two different cultures: on surface cold, refined and controlled Swedish culture reflected in the design of the house (modern, functional, but not warm), and the Balkan culture (in this case Serbia where character of Bogdan is from) as loud, spontaneous, full of life kind of thing. The house is certainly a piece of art, and is like another character in the film, but that was hardly enough to make the film more enjoyable. There was more to explore in the story itself, but the film for me is rather shallow.

I also saw this film at Sundance. It is one of those films that you want to return to again and again. I would place it in a category with The Hairdresser's Husband. Sometimes the music of the Serbian band had the comedy of the dancing husband in Hairdresser's Husband. However, the ending isn't as depressing Hairdresser's Husband. This is more a story of freedom found through making peace with loss. One minor correction in response to the initial reviewer of this film: to my memory, she is merely a landlord to the musician, not his lover. As I recall it, the romance came at the end of the movie. Escaping the chaos in her home surrounding the arrival of the three women with whom her husband had ties, she has a brief, sexual encounter with young man she meets in a hotel. Beyond plot, I recently traveled to Sweden and can say this film caught the color of this beautiful country. Too bad this isn't on DVD yet.

I saw this film at Sundance over a year ago, and I'm quite puzzled why it hasn't been released yet...you typically expect Swedish films about death and grief to be tedious and depressing exercises in audience endurance ("Italian for Beginners" springs to mind), but this was a sensitive, eloquent and elegiac film with an effective dash of eroticism; Lena Endre plays a recent widow who, after her husband's accidental death, forges relationships with her husband's previous lovers. In the process she begins a romance with a Serbian musician who moves into her basement. The film runs into a couple of creaky metaphors that keep it from hitting all the right notes - Endre's character lives in the home her husband built, a creepy and clinical modernist prison made out of cement; the blood stain from the husband's fatal fall lingers on the floor of the basement, a mess which Endre and the mistresses reluctantly clean up together - but the film as a whole is refreshing, honest and deeply satisfying. I hope to see it in art house theaters soon.