METASTASES

METASTAZE was scripted by Ognjen Sviličić, whose affectionate father-and-son tale ARMIN won the award of the Federal Foreign Office at goEast in 2007. This new screenplay ventures into harsher territory where the sons are junkies, alcoholics or hooligans. Branko Schmidt turned his film, a touch cynically, into a Croatian variation on TRAINSPOTTING that catapults the viewer into the world of puffed-up macho posing in the streets of Zagreb. One chapter is dedicated to each main figure. Filip, back from a long stay abroad, is at a loss in his native city. The racist, woman-hating thug Krpa shockingly personifies a number of the gravest problems faced by Croatian society. Alcohol proves to be the downfall of Kizo, who is kind-hearted but hardly bright. Dejo, a junkie with an unfortunate sense of timing, manoeuvres himself into various prickly situations. The four men go back a long way, and Filip’s return triggers a brief period of nostalgic drinking rites. But the old bonds soon prove no more stable than the group’s personalities, and the inevitable implosion occurs. The title is fraught with implications that lend the film societal dimensions not overtly addressed by the plot: the festering sore of the war that ripped apart the constituent Yugoslav republics from the early 1990s onward, and now lodged, tumour-like, in the psyche of the next generation.