Murina Review: An Inchoate Coming-of-Age Tale Set on the Adriatic Coast

Paradise, as Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s film shows, is hell for those without the freedom to leave.

Murina
Photo: Kino Lorber

In Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina, the Adriatic is a sea of contradictions for 17-year-old Julija (Gracija Filipovic). Trained since childhood by her abusive father, Ante (Leon Lucev), to swim like a porpoise, handle a sailboat, and dive with a speargun to hunt the titular moray eels, she’s more at home in the water than on shore. Maybe too at home, for though the sea offers a temporary respite from her family, in the long term it isolates her with them on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. The constant threat of drowning reflects the menace in her household, where she’s subject, like her mother, Nela (Danica Curcic), to her father’s paternal autocracy. Paradise, as Murina shows, is hell for those without the freedom to leave.

Into this volatile situation steps Javier (Cliff Curtis), a globe-trotting millionaire and Ante’s former boss—the only person here who’s capable of checking Ante’s authority (he himself refers to Javier as “God on Earth”). Theirs is a thorny past. Ante hates as much as idolizes him, and though Javier makes a display of forgiving Ante for sinking his father’s yacht, there’s bad blood between them. Julija comes to learn of Javier’s past love for her mother, and the attraction lingering between them is transparent. He has eyes for Julija, too, though it’s unclear if his attachment to her is strictly paternal or if he sees her as her mother once was. If there’s a whiff of Freudian allegory to all this, Murina never overstates it.

Throughout the film, the expressive cinematography by Hélène Louvart probes the depths of an underwater paradise, framing its claustrophobic caves and slithering denizens as manifestations of the subconscious. In a dream sequence, an eel furls like a wisp of black smoke around Ante’s neck and Julija fires her harpoon, missing the eel and catching her father in the throat just before the film cuts away. In a later scene, Javier takes Julija scuba diving just to point out the wreck of his father’s yacht, decaying on the seafloor like a repressed memory.

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In and out of dreams, Filipovic vibrantly brings Julija’s adolescent restlessness to life, and how the characters’ strength and determination is formed under pressure of her father’s cruelty. Julija sees in Javier the chance for escape—from her father and the bondage of childhood. But as Kusijanović is at pains to show with the film’s richly metaphoric climax, escaping patriarchy isn’t as simple as running from one man into the arms of another, more powerful man.

With so much screen time devoted to portraying Julija’s complexities, the other characters remain half-developed, to the detriment of Murina’s themes. Ante, by contrast, is the caricature of the abusive father. Kusijanović and co-screenwriter Frank Graziano spool out just enough of his backstory with Javier for us to guess that he recapitulates, in a cruder form, the oppression that he once endured at the hands of Javier, taking out his frustrated desires for power on his wife and daughter. Even so, cruelty and obsequiousness are the attributes he displays. Nela, for her part, is little more than a perpetual victim, representing what Julija fears to become. Javier is less thinly sketched, but he also, perhaps fittingly, remains a cipher.

Murina concludes with the open-endedness of many a coming-of-age film. In this case, a long take from helicopter serves as an equivalent to the famous freeze frame at the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, showing Julija swimming on her back farther and farther out to sea, never flagging as the camera withdraws, winding up a tension that never releases and leaving us with the impression that she’s too far out to return. She may drown, cross to an uninhabited island beyond the frame, or become a creature of the sea. Whether the audience chooses to interpret this shot as an image of self-reliance or self-destruction, neither is a satisfactory answer to the conundrum posed by Murina—how to break free of patterns of abuse and exploitation—as it comes across as Kusijanović kicking the can down the road.

Score: 
 Cast: Gracija Filipovic, Leon Lucev, Danica Curcic, Cliff Curtis  Director: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović  Screenwriter: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, Frank Graziano  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 96 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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