Ubistvo s predumisljajem

Another offering from Ljubisa Samardzic's post-acting career workshop. This time he was at it as a producer, before his rather mediocre directorial attempts in "Nebeska udica" and "Natasa".

Here, he and director Gorcin Stojanovic took a novel by the late great Slobodan Selenic and made a decent movie out of it.

Two separate stories run concurrently through the film. First, in the 1990s Belgrade with young Jelena (Branka Katic) meeting a soldier Bogdan, a Serb form Croatia (Nebojsa Glogovac) who's in town recovering after being wounded at the frontlines in Croatia. And the other in late 1940s Belgrade, told through Jelena's grandmother's journal that she found years later. In it, her grandma of the same name (played by: Ana Sofrenovic) is trying to free her Chetnik sympathizer stepfather from jail while herself adjusting to new post-WW2 realities and being wooed by two men - stepfather's snobby son Jovan (Dragan Micanovic) and a powerful Partizan commander Krsman (Sergej Trifunovic).

After a poor start movie starts delivering and gets better with each passing scene. There were many insightful moments but also some melodramatic fluff which would've been better suited for a sappy TV drama.

In the end, one gets a feeling "Ubistvo s predumisljajem" turned out OK despite the director rather than because of him. This movie's quality is in the great Slobodan Selenic story, which proved too good to be messed up by anyone and is alone worth the price of admission.