In The Disobedient, Serbian Director Mina Djukic takes on the love story; probably the most popular, and most overdone subject in all of fiction, but she creates a variation that is vibrantly original. Scripted and shot based on ideas that came from Djukic’s dreams and ponderings, the relationship between the film’s protagonists Leni (Hana Selimovic) and Lazar (Mladen Sovilj) begins at the edge of whimsical, and continues from there.
Leni and Lazar are childhood friends, who after being separated for some time, are reunited and decide to take a spontaneous bike trip across northern Serbia. They have a penchant for erratic, nutty behavior. Leni mentions a secret language, and it seems that Lazar understands it as well, because they have and an incredible ability to communicate without speech. Their undiscussed, ruckus-causing camaraderie evokes variations of the love theme, but digs deeper than typical love stories, and this certainly makes the film more interesting.
At first this relationship seem too quirky, too careless, too much like actors portraying people in a relationship that could only exist in an indie film, but this changes as Djukic’s shows that this relationship is not a gimmick as we see the characters develop. They ride their bikes, going wherever they please, never getting a flat or hitting tough terrain. They never use money and then never seem to eat or drink, and they always look great. Hana Selimovic is incredibly beautiful but never lets on that she knows it. A lesser actress might rely on her looks, but Leni doesn’t appear to care about the physical, only the imaginary. On screen though, in physical form, Selimovic is an aesthetic marvel.
As they explore the countryside in which they grew up, despite the familiarity of it all, they continue to come across new things, both in the landscape and in their relationship. In the end they have to decide whether they can continue misbehaving in the imaginary world, or if it’s time to enter the real one. Djukic and her two stars make this cinematic encounter into something more than unique, something that is at once annoying in it’s exaggeration, but also amazing, testing, stunning, boring, expressing a kind of experience that Djukic has herself imagined, wished, and lived, but has been brought to life in her cast, but, as Djukic herself said, brought to life in a way completely different than she ever though possible.
