Safe Place

(Sigurno mjesto, Juraj Lerotic, Croatia, 2022)

There is much talk in the modern world of the need to create safe spaces within society for individuals facing oppression or disadvantage of various kinds. But there are no such spaces in the ironically titled Safe Place, an impressive debut feature written and directed by Juraj Lerotić. (His noted short film, Then I See Tanja, hails from a decade earlier.)

Set largely in the administrative offices and high-rise apartments of Zagreb and Split, it shows the fraught interactions between two adult brothers, Damir (Goran Markovic) and Bruno (Lerotić), and their mother (Snjezana Sinovcic), beginning from a moment of crisis: Damir’s nearly successful suicide attempt.

The diagnosis of Damir’s condition is open to ongoing speculation – is it depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia? – but the film’s critical focus is squarely on the less-than-compassionate treatment that he receives at the hands of medical and police personnel, as he is passed from one bare room to another for “processing”.

At first glance, Safe Place would appear to be a grimly realistic film, graced by highly naturalistic acting and the glaring absence of a music score. But its visual treatment, alternating between static long takes and camera movements that record the characters’ passage between spaces, is precisely systematic – more post-Bressonian than post-neo-realist.

Most importantly, stay attuned to the unusual, surreal or reflexive moments that underline the film’s artifice – and that signal Lerotić’s debt to figures such as Abbas Kiarostami.

One fragment stands out above all, when a tiny digital crack appears, so subtle that some viewers (as well as some curators/programmers) do not even see it: in the middle of a poignant sick-bed scene, Damir’s shirt suddenly changes colour, he withdraws an impossibly already-lit cigarette from his pocket … and begins to talk about the construction of the film way beyond the boundaries of its fiction.

After all the pessimistic, constrained realism that precedes this magic moment, it signifies (in its own way) Freedom At Last for Safe Place! It’s a film that rewards close, patient, multiple viewings.

© Adrian Martin 25 October 2022