MOTHER OF ASPHALT

At first glance Mare and Janko seem like an ordinary thirty-year-old couple. Aspiring middle-class Croatians, they have good jobs and own the apartment in which they live with their 7-year old son. But all is not well beneath the glossy surface: the couple’s relationship is in crisis, and the crippling mortgage payments are just part of the problem. The tone of their everyday communications is either glacial or deliberately provocative. Just before Christmas, Mare loses her job. An argument ensues; she packs a few essentials and walks out – taking Bruno with her. It’s an adventure, she tells the boy, but Mare is penniless and has no idea what comes next. Seeing the mother and son spending the frosty nights on the backseat of her car, the curiosity of Milan, a security guard, is roused. Matanic’s chronicle of Croatia’s post-war generation caught between fragile material conditions and a sense of homelessness (emotional and otherwise) takes a critical look at consumerism and the narrow middle-class world. Mercilessly scratching at the upwardly mobile facade presented to the world, he exposes the underlying loneliness, the traditional role models, the inflexible relations and emotional frigidity.