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VENICE 2022 International Film Critics’ Week

Review: Have You Seen This Woman?

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- VENICE 2022: The feature debut by Serbian directors Dušan Zorić and Matija Gluščević searches for that most mysterious of figures: the middle-aged mother

Review: Have You Seen This Woman?
Ksenija Marinković in Have You Seen This Woman?

A TV reporter stands in a Belgrade flat, talking to the camera about the owner who has disappeared without a trace. What happened to middle-aged Draginja? Have You Seen This Woman? [+see also:
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, the feature debut by Serbian directors Dušan Zorić and Matija Gluščević, takes as its subject the elusive figure of the middle-aged mother, so familiar yet so unknown, a constant through most people’s lives, but also an enigma. She exists in the interstitial parts of life, and in trying to find this missing woman, Zorić and Gluščević’s film, which has premiered in the International Film Critics’ Week at the Venice Film Festival, itself ends up in the strange and obscure corners of Serbian society.

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This description may make the film sound more straightforward than it really is: in fact, the two filmmakers let the alienating, peculiar sensation of being essentially invisible to the rest of the world — less a person than a function or a tool for others to use — infect the very fabric and texture of their film. Have You Seen This Woman? begins almost like a “normal” movie, following Draginja (Ksenija Marinković), a door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales person, as she demonstrates the properties of the machine to various potential clients in their homes. Things start to look a bit off when a cosy couple casually flick their crumbs onto the carpet for her to clean; later, a silent, elderly lady lets her in but completely ignores her; another kills herself with washing-up liquid. Zorić and Gluščević bring our attention to the role of women in society in a deliberately shifty way; both blunt and subtle, their method consists of taking banal, everyday scenes and making them strange, exaggerating them in one particular direction in order to better highlight how absurd they already are.

Thankfully, it’s a method the directors are loose with, sometimes moving only slightly towards the surreal, and at other times creating entire far-fetched scenarios for Draginja to evolve in. One section of the film sees the woman, her hair now inexplicably styled in glamorous waves and coloured bright red, working as a nurse in a hospital; she steals a baby for the weekend and hires an actor (the excellent Boris Isaković, seen in Working Class Heroes [+see also:
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and Quo Vadis, Aida? [+see also:
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) to act as her husband during a zoom chat with her son who, in a poignantly realistic detail, has moved to another country. In another part of the film, Draginja (her hair now blonde) dances in a club with a drunk young woman who gets into a fight with her boyfriend, then apologises to him profusely. Quickly moving from one such scenario to another, the film as a whole clearly does not evolve in a realistic space. Rather than take the images at face value, we are forced and encouraged to try to connect the dots between the various dynamics that Draginja encounters: the performance involved in presenting the image of the perfect family; women’s dependence on men, and the way they are rejected once past a certain age.

Surprise is one of the driving forces of the film, but it would only carry the viewer so far without the lived-in performance by Ksenija Marinković. One could imagine a version of this often absurd film to be entirely composed of still, intentionally drab long takes, the actors’ acting style stiff and unnatural. Instead, the directors’ dynamic camera, their use of close-ups and the completely sincere turn by Marinković make this an emotionally engaging film, as Draginja is always recognisably human throughout the many sudden shifts and changes of scenery. An unpredictable and slippery journey through an identity in crisis, Have You Seen This Woman? bucks convention at every turn to explore the warped needs and desires, the regrets and the imagination of a woman in search of herself.

Have You Seen This Woman? was produced by ​​Non-Aligned Films and Dinaridi Film

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Photogallery 08/09/2022: Venice 2022 - Have You Seen This Woman?

16 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.

Matija Gluščević, Dušan Zorić, Ksenija Marinković, Isidora Simijonović, Boris Isaković, Alex Elektra, Ivana Vuković, Vlasta Velisavljević, Goran Bogdan
© 2022 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it

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