Credit where it’s due: Dane Komljen is one uncompromising director. After his debut feature, 2016’s All the Cities of the North, enjoyed widespread acclaim from critics and cinephiles, his next, 2022’s Afterwater, seemed almost designed to jettison the goodwill he’d earnt. Esoteric, unpredictable, and downright bizarre, it divided opinion in a way that his newest feature, Desire Lines, may be destined to do as well. But where this writer found Afterwater’s eccentricities to be audacious and endearing, Desire Lines is comparatively baffling, even comical in its earnest, banal pomposity. Its esotericism is commonplace, its unpredictability trite, and its bizarreness just silly.
Branko (Ivan Čuić, admirably committed) wanders the streets of Belgrade after his wayward younger brother, and ambles through his apartment, sleepless and detached from the world. He scarcely speaks, finding connection in no one and occupation in nothing. So he walks, apparently away from nothing and toward nothing, until he can walk no more. And he finds nothing. But then Branko is found by a group of fellow societal outsiders, people who appear to understand him better than he understands himself; as they nurture and embrace him, demonstrating what his life could and perhaps should be like, he finds a purpose to his existence that his old lifestyle never showed him.
And that’s basically it. There’s plenty else going on in Desire Lines — rocks have some importance, mushrooms some more, and Komljen gestures toward certain themes and motifs, but he’s far, far too coy with any of these ideas to integrate them properly into his story. It’s a soporific mood piece in search of its own purpose; unlike Branko, it never finds it, since Komljen only hints at said purpose, never fully communicating it. The disparate ideas only register as peculiarities and affectations, weightless and meaningless as one dour, posey scene drifts into the next. There’s so little material interest that investment is practically discouraged, and the various little quirks don’t contribute to the bigger picture — individually, they’re just absurd, and cumulatively, their significance is near-impossible to figure out. For such an ostensibly simple film, it’s quite the puzzle, yet it’s not one that rewards any attempts to solve.
Since Komljen has previously proven his competency as a filmmaker, one can see the signs of good, intelligent work here — it’s largely only his refusal/inability to convey the aggregate function of this work within this story that prevents any of it from acquiring substantial worth. City life is characterized by divisions and barriers, and contrasts with open spaces (the most memorable being a painted landscape on a wall — another division). Verbal connections are established only in separation, via telephone, and even then not directly. In one scene, Branko is seemingly only capable of viewing the world through heat vision goggles. There may be valid ideas underpinning these motifs but, if so, Komljen neither develops nor dictates them adequately. If not, then it’s considerably worse — could it be that these ideas are just as mundane as they read on paper (physical divisions representing psychological divisions etc.)?
It’s dispiriting to take such a dim view on the work of a gifted artist, but it’s so difficult to discern any other meaning to Desire Lines that it may be the only view to take. Komljen’s never been a straightforward filmmaker, never one to spell things out for his audience, but his uncompromising nature has led him down a most curious path here, and the outcome for him is much less auspicious than it is for Branko. One other motif in Desire Lines is the remembrance, or misremembrance, of the past. The past Komljen was a fascinating artist, full of promise, bold and distinctive in his vision and his approach. I hope I’m not misremembering him.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
Comments are closed.