Drago Krča

Based on a novel by Ivan Slamnig.

Eastern Croatian front, December 1991. Famed violinist Ivan Lesjak, his best friend and their travelling band perform for the exhausted soldiers on the frontlines. During one of these private concerts, the camp they're staying in is bombareded by Serbian forces. In the midst of the chaos, Ivan's best friend looses and arm and dies from his injuries soon after. Traumtized by what he saw, Ivan decides to leave the country and keep his parents company in their viennese apartment, however, the lights and crowds of the metropolis further increase his anxiety, until he meets Marina, another Croatian refugee who came to work in Austria as a nurse.

Nazi-occupied Croatia, 1941. A young university student named Matija Remenar moves from his small provincial town to Zagreb. During his stay, he notices a beautiful woman in the window across the street from his apartment, falling head over heals for her. He names this woman Nausicaa, after the eponymous character from Homer's Odyssey. Things complicate, however, when he becomes involved in an active suicide investigation of the three tennants who had rented the apartment prior to him. Not only that, but the apartment's original owner, middle-aged mrs. Šlajner, seemingly becomes infatuated with him, despite the huge age gap.

A pretty factory girl falls for an ex con. He's still in love with his ex wife. Love triangle soon becomes even larger.

One day, Fortune and Worry come to town. Fortune leaves her magical cloak in the local inn, saying that it fulfills every wish to those who wear it. However, Worry knows that Fortune doesn't come alone, but brings worries with herself, too. The magical cloak changes its owner and fulfills the most unusual wishes of timid professor of violin, old night guard, naive student and blonde girl. When all their wishes are fulfilled, they find out that they did not achieve happiness.

Originally published in 1865, the novel's plot was inspired by Shakespeare's famous play Romeo and Juliet, and is set in Turopolje after the recent abolition of Bach's absolutism, i.e. when the Croats in the Habsburg Monarchy began to exercise political rights that long had been denied to them.

This drama premiered in Zagreb in 1935. The plot shows a young man from a well-to-do bourgeois family facing the anger of his parents over his absences from high school, behind which stands his forbidden love with a girl of humble working-class background.

By using the motifs of Krleza's play "Adam and Eve", written in 1922, director Tomislav Radic questions a similar pattern of male-female relations in a trivial, contemporary context. With Krleza's lines, Radic counterpoints almost documentary sequences from life, showing how Krleza's youthful distaste for the bourgeois concept of "love" can be actualized in a fundamentally different social environment.