Ivana Mladenovic, the director of the film ‘Sorella din Clausura‘ (‘Cloistered Sister‘ in the English distribution), was born in Serbia, but studied theater and film in Romania, where her four feature films to date have been made. The film’s title, in Italian, refers to nuns who live in seclusion and silence, but who, at some point, find the opportunity to express themselves, perhaps through songs. A similar path suggests the original script – of which the director is a co-author – for Stela, the film’s heroine. Her searches (perhaps her gropings would be a more accurate word) take place in a world in transition and in a space that is common to Ivana Mladenovic‘s films – that of the Balkans. A film in which even if one feels the influence of filmmakers like Emir Kusturica and Radu Jude, who are probably among the directors’ masters, the personality of a filmmaker who has a lot to say and expresses it in an articulate and original manner is already clearly outlined.
Stela grew up in Timișoara, the capital of Banat, the most Balkanic area of Romania. At the age of 12, in 1986, she saw on television (probably on Serbian television received by pirate antennas at the time) Boban, a successful singer much older than her. She fell in love with him and this admiration as a teenage fan turned into an obsession that would not leave her. Over two decades later, in a different world than the one in which she was born, in the Romania that had just joined the EU, Stela does not find her place. She has no job even though she graduated in philology and is unable to maintain a stable relationship because she looks for ‘at least 1% of Boban’ in every man. She obsessively follows the aging rockstar and those around him, and just when she has the opportunity to get close to him, she becomes speechless like the nuns in the film’s title. Will she find the strength to overcome her obsession and find her path in the real world?
Ivana Mladenovic brings to the screen a marginal, unstable world, soaked in a popular counterculture amplified by the media and especially by television, which is almost constantly present on the screen. Katia Pascariu plays the main role and what she has achieved in this film is, in my opinion, formidable. Stela is a woman who sees the world through the prism of her obsession that makes her feel uncomfortable in her own skin. Her failure – social-wise and woman-wise – is brought to the screen in a style devoid of drama and with a paradoxically effective humor. The editing is nervous, sometimes seems sloppy, the sound is sometimes unclear, but all of this seems to be intentional. The director did not want to depict a chaotic world in a polished film, on the contrary, she tried, it seemed to me, to emulate the cinematic means of the year in which the film was set. Among the other actors, I cannot fail to mention Miodrag Mladenovic, the director’s father, who played the role of Boban. Although the film tells the story of a failure in an unstable world in which some characters do not end well, the viewing is interesting, the comedy annihilates the intentions of taking what is happening on the screen too seriously, and the cinematic experience is both engaging and meaningful.